At the age of twenty-one, Brian Boyd wrote a thesis on Vladimir Nabokov that the famous author called "brilliant." After gaining exclusive access to the writer's archives, he wrote a two-part, award-winning biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991). This collection features essays written by Boyd since completing the biography, incorporating material he gleaned from his research as well as new discoveries and formulations.
Boyd confronts Nabokov's life, career, and legacy; his art, science, and thought; his subtle humor and puzzle-like storytelling; his complex psychological portraits; and his inheritance from, reworking of, and affinities with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Machado de Assis. Boyd offers new ways of reading Nabokov's best English-language works: Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and the unparalleled autobiography, Speak, Memory, and he discloses otherwise unknown information about the author's world. Sharing his personal reflections, Boyd recounts the adventures, hardships, and revelations of researching Nabokov's biography and his unusual finds in the archives, including materials still awaiting publication. The first to focus on Nabokov's metaphysics, Boyd cautions against their being used as the key to unlock all of the author's secrets, showing instead the many other rooms in Nabokov's castle of fiction that need exploring, such as his humor, narrative invention, and psychological insight into characters and readers alike. Appreciating Nabokov as novelist, memoirist, poet, translator, scientist, and individual, Boyd helps us understand more than ever the author's multifaceted genius.
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Nabokov: The Writer’s Life and the Life Writer
- 1. A Centennial Toast
- 2. A Biographer’s Life
- 3. Who Is “My Nabokov”?
- Nabokov’s Manuscripts and Books
- 4. The Nabokov Biography and the Nabokov Archive
- 5. From the Nabokov Archive Nabokov’s Literary Legacy
- Nabokov’s Metaphysics
- 6. Retrospects and Prospects
- 7. Nabokov’s Afterlife
- Nabokov’s Butterflies
- 8. Nabokov, Literature, Lepidoptera
- 9. Netting Nabokov: Review of Dieter E. Zimmer, A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths, 2001
- Nabokov as Phychologist
- 10. The Psychological Work of Fictional Play
- Nabokov and the Origins and Ends of Stories
- 11. Stacks of Stories, Stories of Stacks
- Nabokov as Writer
- 12. Nabokov’s Humor
- 13. Nabokov as Storyteller
- 14. Nabokov’s Transition from Russian to English: Repudiation or Evolution?
- Nabokov and Others
- 15. Nabokov, Pushkin, Shakespeare: Genius, Generosity, and Gratitude in The Gift and Pale Fire
- 16. Nabokov as Verse Translator: Introduction to Verses and Versions
- 17. Tolstoy and Nabokov
- 18. Nabokov and Machado de Assis
- Nabokov Works
- 19. Speak, Memory: The Life and the Art
- 20. Speak, Memory: Nabokov, Mother, and Lovers: The Weave of the Magic Carpet
- 21. Lolita: Scene and Unseen
- 22. Even Homais Nods: Nabokov’s Fallibility; Or, How to Revise Lolita
- 23. Literature, Pattern, Lolita; Or, Art, Literature, Science
- 24. “Pale Fire”: Poem and Pattern
- 25. Ada: The Bog and the Garden; Or, Straw, Fluff, and Peat: Sources and Places in Ada
- 26. A Book Burner Recants: The Original of Laura
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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