Nabokov in America

On the Road to Lolita

Robert Roper (Bloomsbury, 354pp, £20, Oldie price £16.50)

‘HOW DID a Russian-born novelist with such Fabergé-egg-like refinements produce a rapturous hymn to American roadside culture?’ asked Ian Thomson in the Independent. Besides being an account of illicit sexual obsession, Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 best-known and most notorious novel, Lolita, is, wrote Thomson, ‘a Walt Whitman-like celebration of New World canyons, nature reserves, diners and cowboy-themed motels’.

Nabokov, who was exiled from his Russian homeland by the revolution, was exiled again when he left France with his Jewish wife Vera and their son Dmitri for New York on one of the last ships out before the Nazis arrived. As Duncan White in the Daily Telegraph put it: ‘In America he found not only

sanctuary after two decades of uncertainty but also a place in which to reinvent himself: he arrived an obscure Russian writer and left the most famous literary novelist in the world.’

Robert Roper has diligently followed the Nabokovs’ long trips (notching up 20,000 miles) round their adopted country, following his thesis that it was in America that Nabokov wrote his greatest books. Roger Lewis in the Times noted that Lolita was not the only book in which Nabokov examined paedophilia. ‘He was drawn again and again to tales “of the forbidden, of humiliation and compulsion”.’ While noting that ‘no one has ever found evidence of the proclivity in the novelist’s own life’, Lewis wondered at Nabokov’s ‘creepy diligence as a lepidopterist’.

Lewis found that Nabokov comes across in Roper’s biography as ‘an ugly customer. He had no friends and poor old Vera was his devoted slave, his chauffeur, amanuensis, secretary, cook and no doubt manicurist and bodyguard.’ Nevertheless, he concluded, ‘he was a prose stylist of genius, if that counts for anything any more.’

‘He was drawn again and again to tales of the forbidden, of humiliation and compulsion’