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This sense of linguistic homelessness is evident throughout his work, but most poignant in the poem "An Evening of Russian Poetry" ("Beyond the seas where I have lost a scepter,/ I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns").
In 1925 Nabokov married Vera Slonim, daughter of a Jewish industrialist from St. Petersburg who had also fled the revolution. A son, Dmitri, now an opera singer in Europe, was born in 1934. Five years later, the family sailed for the U.S., where Nabokov soon be gan to feel "as American as April in Arizona." He taught at Wellesley and Cor nell, studied butterflies at Harvard, and published stories in such magazines as Esquire and The New Yorker. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947) earned high praise but few royalties. With the American edition of Lolita in 1958, Nabokov be came an unpronounceable household name.* It now seems incredible that only a generation ago a sexually unexplicit novel about a middle-aged man and a pubescent girl caused a national scandal. Yet the notoriety put the book on the bestseller list and Nabokov on the road to financial independence.
Scimitars of Anger. A famous and acclaimed Nabokov was stylistically careful but never shy about expressing his views on the modern world that up rooted him. From Switzerland, where he moved in 1959, he flashed scimitars of anger and loosed heavy-hearted outrage at crudities, vulgar sentimentality and artistic pretensions that he lumped un der the termposhlost. The word, Russian for a kind of middle-class tackiness, applied not only to the shibboleths and dashboard saints of popular culture but also to the works of Sigmund Freud — which he saw as an internal totalitarianism — and to the poetry of Ezra Pound, whom he called "that total fake."
Politically, Nabokov saw himself as an old-fashioned liberal, though by current standards he was a William F. Buckley conservative. His suggestion that the portrait of a head of government "should not exceed a postage stamp in size" makes good sense in any ideology.
Nabokov crossed too many borders to have been a winner in the geopolitics of the Nobel Prize. Yet he gave a prize greater than any he might have received: his challenging, intricate fiction, which miraculously demonstrates that art is not a mirror held up to na ture, but rather a prism that refracts blinding reality into rainbows of wisdom and feeling.
* The correct pronunciation is Nahfoakoff.
R.Z. Sheppard