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Summary
Summary
A startling and revelatory examination of Nabokov's life and works--notably Pale Fire and Lolita --bringing new insight into one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic authors.
Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fleeing France with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis. He repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering to write artful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in the English language really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so many critics?
Using information from newly-declassified intelligence files and recovered military history, journalist Andrea Pitzer argues that far from being a proponent of art for art's sake, Vladimir Nabokov managed to hide disturbing history in his fiction--history that has gone unnoticed for decades. Nabokov emerges as a kind of documentary conjurer, spending the most productive decades of his career recording a saga of forgotten concentration camps and searing bigotry, from World War I to the Gulag and the Holocaust. Lolita surrenders Humbert Humbert's secret identity, and reveals a Nabokov appalled by American anti-Semitism. The lunatic narrator of Pale Fire recalls Russian tragedies that once haunted the world. From Tsarist courts to Nazi film sets, from CIA front organizations to wartime Casablanca, the story of Nabokov's family is the story of his century--and both are woven inextricably into his fiction.
Author Notes
Andrea Pitzer founded Nieman Storyboard, the narrative nonfiction site of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Her work has also appeared in print in USA Today's Life section and online at www.HiLowbrow.com. She presented on Nabokov's fiction at the 2009 MLA Conference, is a graduate of Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and lives in northern Virginia.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Despite the title, this literary study-cum-biography contains little in the way of salacious details from Nabokov's personal life. Instead, journalist Pitzer argues that Nabokov's work, and his eventful but not notably scandalous life, intersected with very public history in ways often missed or misunderstood. Many know Nabokov as a Russian aristocrat and refugee from the Bolsheviks, but Pitzer expands on these facts to describe how his liberal reformer father, V.D., fell afoul of both Lenin and czarist supporters. Though the experience made Nabokov staunchly anticommunist, Pitzer's use of Alexander Solzhenistyn in counterpoint throughout illustrates how much more subtly her subject addressed political violence. The Holocaust also casts a shadow over this account of his life, from his gay, outspokenly anti-Nazi brother Sergei's death in a concentration camp, to his beloved wife Vera's defiant assertions of her Jewish identity against postwar America's more genteel but still pervasive anti-Semitism. Pitzer finds this latter theme running through Lolita in unspoken parallel to Humbert Humbert's more obvious obsessions, while Zembla, the lunatic narrator's apparently illusory birthplace in Pale Fire, turns out to correspond to the Arctic archipelago Nova Zembla, a mysterious last stop for Soviet political prisoners. Though Pitzer's stylized prose is burdened by a vain hope of equaling Nabokov's mastery, her fresh perspective will likely send readers back to his books. 16 pages b&w photos. Agent: Katherine Boyle, Veritas Agency. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In a personal note Nabokov sent to Solzhenitsyn in 1974, on the day the dissident writer was expelled from the Soviet Union, Pitzer recognizes a telling connection between two writers who shared more than most critics have realized. For beneath the consummate artifice of Nabokov's tales, Pitzer discerns a hidden historical vision aligned to a surprising degree with Solzhenitsyn's. Largely undetected, the same nightmarish world of Communist brutality that Solzhenitsyn exposed in his Gulag Archipelago lies embedded in the recesses of Nabokov's major works, including Bend Sinister, Pnin, and Ada. The ugly historical effects of the Soviet Union's open-air nuclear testing lie behind otherwise puzzling features of Pale Fire. Perhaps most surprising is the presence in the depths of Nabokov's (in)famous Lolita of the horrific history of the Nazi death camps. Through her historically grounded readings of his fiction, Pitzer discredits the widespread but misleading perception of Nabokov as an art-for-art's-sake writer indifferent to the moral and political exigencies of his day. But as readers explore his devious strategies for veiling sobering historical realities in aesthetic illusions, they slowly become aware of the interpretive responsibilities that Nabokov places on the reader. A penetrating analysis certain to compel a major reassessment of the Nabokov canon.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2010 Booklist
Choice Review
Rarely was Nabokov's fiction overtly political, although he vehemently aired his sociopolitical opinions in interviews. Pitzer (journalist and former editor, Nieman Storyboard) presents a revisionist view that Nabokov's fiction obliquely encodes a scathing critique of Soviet and Nazi power, basing her argument on her decoding of elements in his fiction. She does not treat Nabokov's fiction as art, but focuses on the stories' buried sociopolitical subtext. Early novels such as Invitation to a Beheading have allegorical political undertones that become overt in Nabokov's first "American" novel, Bend Sinister. The political becomes more prominent in Lolita, which briefly recounts mad Humbert's veiled allusions to his experiences in Canada where suspect European refugees were interned during (and after) the war years. Pale Fire is the high watermark of Nabokov's covert theme where he blends Kinbote/Botkin's delusional Zembla with Novaya Zemlya, the remote site of a notorious Soviet prison camp and test ground for the early Soviet A-bomb development. Pitzer has meticulously drawn on press reports and US government documents. Bountifully footnoted and illustrated with photos, the study is an impressive job but marginal for understanding Nabokov's art. Summing Up: Recommended. For comprehensive collections serving upper-division undergraduates through faculty. D. B. Johnson emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara
Kirkus Review
Vladimir Nabokov (18991977) always claimed that art and politics don't mix, but this new biography suggests his own art tells a different story. In her first book, Pitzer focuses on one of the lingering mysteries about Nabokov: How could anyone so acquainted with the horrors of the Soviet Union (which killed his father) and Nazi Germany (which killed his brother) be so detached from the real world in his work? Born in the twilight of Czarist Russia, Nabokov fled the post-revolutionary landscape and spent years making his name among the migr writers in Berlin, where he would also be forced to flee, with his Jewish wife and their young son, as Hitler came into power. Arriving in America and landing a teaching position, Nabokov focused on his writing and, as some saw it, forgot the past; he never spoke out against injustice, signed petitions, made speeches or even voted. While Solzhenitsyn was suffering in a Soviet prison camp, Nabokov was crafting an intricate novel about a middle-aged pervert's passion for a 12-year-old "nymphet." Yet, according to Pitzer, in his own imaginative way, Nabokov was bearing witness to the horrors he knew. Drawing on new biographical material and her sharp critical senses, Pitzer reveals the tightly woven subtext of the novels, always keen to shine a light where the deception is not obvious. She suggests that Humbert Humbert, Lolita's predatory narrator, is a Jew who has been destroyed by what he experienced during the war years. Hermann in Despair, the title character of Pnin and Kinbote in Pale Fire--all bear similar psychic wounds, victims of history who sometimes become villains. Though no substitute for Brian Boyd's definitive two-volume biography, this is a brilliant examination that adds to the understanding of an inspiring and enigmatic life.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Journalist Pitzer (founder, Nieman Storyboard) tackles the life and work of Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) from a critical and refreshing viewpoint different from previous biographies. She aims to connect the turbulent events in the author's life to the events in his fiction. A writer known for his appreciation of aesthetics over historically and politically themed plotlines, Nabokov lived through the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust (his brother Sergey died in a concentration camp). Pitzer shows how Nabokov's work relates these events in a way hidden from the reader. Drawing on the novels of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, she compares the authors' lives and literary styles to illustrate the differences in how their fiction represents history; for example, Humbert's background in Lolita reflects such events as the Armenian genocide and the German concentration camps. Also, the speculation that he is Jewish perhaps represents the figure of the Wandering Jew. VERDICT Pitzer accomplishes her goal of revealing the indirect appearance of Nabokov's biography in his most celebrated fiction. Highly recommended for all Nabokov fans who as a result of reading this will probably wish to reread the works analyzed here.-Morris Hounion, NYC Technical Coll. Lib., CUNY, Brooklyn (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Introduction | p. ix |
Chapter 1 Waiting for Solzhenitsyn | p. 1 |
Chapter 2 Childhood | p. 22 |
Chapter 3 War | p. 45 |
Chapter 4 Exile | p. 66 |
Chapter 5 Aftermath | p. 84 |
Chapter 6 Descent | p. 111 |
Chapter 7 Purgatory | p. 130 |
Chapter 8 America | p. 162 |
Chapter 9 After the War | p. 196 |
Chapter 10 Lolita | p. 218 |
Chapter 11 Fame | p. 241 |
Chapter 12 Pale Fire | p. 262 |
Chapter 13 Speak, Memory | p. 288 |
Chapter 14 Waiting for Solzhenitsyn | p. 312 |
Coda | p. 349 |
Acknowledgments | p. 353 |
Abbreviations | p. 359 |
Notes | p. 361 |
Index | p. 423 |