Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years

Brian Boyd

Princeton University Press, Jan 31, 1993 - Biography & Autobiography - 607 pages

This first major critical biography of Vladimir Nabokov, one of the greatest of twentieth-century writers, finally allows us full access to the dramatic details of his life and the depths of his art. An intensely private man, Nabokov was uprooted first by the Russian Revolution and then by World War II. Transformed into a permanent wanderer, he did not achieve fame until late in life, with the success of Lolita. In this first of two volumes, Brian Boyd vividly describes the liberal milieu of the aristocratic Nabokovs, their escape from Russia, Nabokov's education at Cambridge, and the murder of his father in Berlin. Boyd then turns to the years that Nabokov spent, impoverished, in Germany and France, until the coming of Hitler forced him to flee, with wife and son, to the United States. This volume stands on its own as a fascinating exploration of Nabokov's Russian years and Russian worlds, prerevolutionary and émigré.


In the course of his ten years' work on the biography, Boyd traveled along Nabokov's trail everywhere from Yalta to Palo Alto. The only scholar to have had free access to the Nabokov archives in Montreux and the Library of Congress, he also interviewed at length Nabokov's family and scores of his friends and associates.


For the general reader, Boyd offers an introduction to Nabokov the man, his works, and his world. For the specialist, he provides a basis for all future research on Nabokov's life and art, as he dates and describes the composition of all Nabokov's works, published and unpublished.


Boyd investigates Nabokov's relation to and his independence from his time, examines the special structures of his mind and thought, and explains the relations between his philosophy and his innovations of literary strategy and style. At the same time he provides succinct introductions to all the fiction, dramas, memoirs, and major verse; presents detailed analyses of the major books that break new ground for the scholar, while providing easy paths into the works for other readers; and shows the relationship between Nabokov's life and the themes and subjects of his art.

What people are saying

Vladimir Nabokov: the Russian years

User Review  - Not Available - Book Verdict

This is the first volume of a detailed critical biography of the Russian-born author of Lolita ( LJ 8/58) and Pale Fire ( LJ 5/15/62). Boyd's analysis of Nabokov's works is bracing, but his summary of ...

User Review -

Boyd's biography of Nabokov is not the "first" and not "critical". This is a perfect example of a
scribbler, to use Barthes' term, who busies himself of diligently repeating, word for word, his employer's view of himself.
But the character of Brian Boyd, the "biographer," takes after the characters depicted by Gustave Flaubert in his last and unfinished novel Bouvard et Pécuchet.
In addition, Brian Boyd is instrumental to eliminating his predecessor and a talented biographer of Nabokov, Andrew Field, from the literary field. If anyone is aware of Field's destiny and
whereabouts, I will appreciate the information. 

Contents

• Berlin 19251926: 241
• Berlin 19271929: 270
• Nabokov the Writer: 292
• The Defense Zashchita Luzhina: 321
• Berlin 19291930: 341
• Berlin 19301932: 362
• Berlin 19321934: 382
• Berlin 19341937: 408
• France 1937: 432
• The Gift Dar: 447
• France 19381939: 479
• France 19391940: 503
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: 525
• INDEX: 583

Popular passages

Page 6 - Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks ! rage ! blow ! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks ! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head ! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world ! Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once, That make ingrateful man ! Fool.‎

Page 301 - Safes drop from rooftops and flatten the odd pedestrian mostly within the panels of the comics, but still, we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling...‎

Page 512 - As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.‎

Page 48 - ... as something in a scrambled picture — Find What the Sailor Has Hidden — that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.‎

Page 385 - I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic buss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.‎

Page 302 - ... which now had reached that state of absolute security, confidence and reliance not found elsewhere in conscious life. With the deep hot sweetness thus established and well on its way to the ultimate convulsion, I felt I could slow down in order to prolong the glow. Lolita had been safely solipsized. The implied sun pulsated in the supplied poplars; we were fantastically and divinely alone...‎

Page 44 - I fancied that strange, pale animals roamed in a landscape of lakes. The recollection of my crib, with its lateral nets of fluffy cotton cords, brings back, too, the pleasure of handling a certain beautiful, delightfully solid, garnet-dark crystal egg left over from some unremembered Easter; I used to chew a corner of the bedsheet until it was thoroughly soaked and then wrap the egg in it tightly, so as to admire and re-lick the warm, ruddy glitter of the snugly enveloped facets that came seeping...‎

Page 83 - This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern— to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.‎

Page 251 - ... its age. I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right...‎

Page 9 - ... but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming.‎

About the author

Brian Boyd is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of the prize-winning Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton 1990), Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton 1991), and Nabokov's Ada: The Place of Consciousness. Referred to in a recent journal as "the great man of Nabokov studies," he has also edited Nabokov's English novels and autobiography for the Library of America and Nabokov's Butterflies for Beacon Press.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years; Volume 1 of Vladimir Nabokov, Brian Boyd
• Author: Brian Boyd
• Edition: illustrated, reprint, revised
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1993
• ISBN: 0691024707, 9780691024707
• Length: 607 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures