ROBERT ALTER in ‘Commentary’, August 1969
Vladimir Nabokov possesses what is probably the most fine ly cultivated sense of form of any living writer, and so there is a satisfying justness in the fact that not only his individual works but also the sequence of his books should evince a formal harmony. In his 1956 afterword to ’Lolita,'...
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| Summary: | Vladimir Nabokov possesses what is probably the most fine
ly cultivated sense of form of any living writer, and so
there is a satisfying justness in the fact that not only
his individual works but also the sequence of his books
should evince a formal harmony. In his 1956 afterword
to ’Lolita,' Nabokov warned that any assessment of his
writing was bound to be out of focus without an awareness
of his Russian work; since then, the translation or re
issue in English of seven of his nine Russian novels has
in fact demonstrated that 'Lolita,' far from being a bril
liant sport, was merely the most radiant and engaging in
a line of books that for three decades had explored the
paradoxical intertwinings of imagination and reality, the
artist and his world, through athletically allusive, in
voluted, and parodistic fictional forms. These same con
cerns were then given even more original and intricate
formal expression in 'Pale Fire,’ while a new central
emphasis in ’Lolita’ on the quest for a paradisiac past
(Humbert Humbert’s golden ’princedom by the sea’) appeared
in oblique refraction through Kinbote's longing for his
lost kingdom. Now, in his seventieth year, at an age
when most novelists one can think of are already gone
sadly to seed, Nabokov has produced a major work that
in a purely formal sense culminates most of what he has
attempted in over forty years of active writing. 'Ada'
is the fullest realization of the program for the novel
articulated in 1941 in Nabokov’s first English book, 'The
Real Life of Sebastian Knight'; as Sebastian Knight
aspired to do, the author of 'Ada' 'use[s] parody as a
kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region
of serious emotion,' and thus succeeds in illuminating
in new depth and breadth the relation between art, reality,
and the evanescent ever-never presence of time past. |
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