Nabokov and the Real World: Between Appreciation and Defense
By Robert Alter
Princeton University Press, $19.95
Reviewed by David Herman
Robert Alter, now in his mid-eighties, is an American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He is also the best-known living translator of the Hebrew Bible (he has published eight volumes of translation including The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary in 2018). He has written books on the art of biblical narrative and that of biblical poetry, and has co-edited The Literary Guide to the Bible.
He is also one of the great literary critics of his generation and is the author of the acclaimed Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem. And, for almost half-a-century, he has been writing about Vladimir Nabokov.
Alter’s latest book, Nabokov and the Real World, is a selection of his essays on Nabokov’s masterpieces: Pale Fire, Lolita, Ada and Pnin; and of his lectures on literature; and themes that include Nabokov and memory and autobiography.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was a renowned stylist. Alter writes admiringly of “the self-reflexivity of his writing, its ingenious deployment of codes and games, its sheer literariness”.
But these essays also address the central questionabout Nabokov: beneath all the famous literary games, the cleverness and the erudition, does Nabokov lose sight of the real world and the passions and tragedies of human life?
Robert Alter’s answer is clear: the Nabokov playfulness is “ultimately about serious things — about the wrenching turns of modern history, about love and the shattering disappointments to which the lover may be vulnerable, about the terrible toll exacted through manipulative relationships, about loyalty and betrayal.”
Nabokov knew about loss and the real world. In 1922, he and his family had to flee from Soviet Communism. It was in that year that his father was murdered in Berlin by a right-wing extremist, and his brother Sergei later died in a concentration camp.
Nabokov, like so many of his greatest characters, was constantly on the move: Cambridge; 15 years in Berlin; a brief period in France; then 20 years in America before spending the rest of his life in Switzerland. His fiction, insists Alter, “is a serious response to twentieth-century politics”.
His greatest characters are perhaps his darkest. Humbert Humbert in Lolita is a monster, a sexual predator, who has been several times institutionalised in asylums.
At first, Pnin seems like a kind of Russian émigré version of Mr Magoo, but then we realise how haunted he is by loss, remembering his sweetheart Mira Belochkin, killed by the Nazis in an extermination camp.
Not everyone shares Alter’s passion for Nabokov. But even sceptics will acknowledge that these clear and dazzlingly erudite essays offer a superb introduction to the writer’s life and work.
David Herman is a senior JC reviewer
