“— ah, that first whiff of the West!”

May 24, 2016 3:37 PM

On the Trail of Nabokov in the American West [The New York Times] On his cross-country trips chasing butterflies and researching “Lolita,” the Russian-born novelist saw more of the United States than did Fitzgerald, Kerouac or Steinbeck.

“For the last 1 5 years my wife, Sarah, and I have driven every summer with our golden retriever from New Jersey to the Northern Rockies. I used to say that I felt like Humbert Humbert, the notoriously unreliable narrator of “Lolita,” who made a similar trip, but instead of traveling with a precocious preteen girl, I was traveling with a wife and a dewy-eyed dog.

But then I learned that Vladimir Nabokov himself had done the same thing. Nabokov wrote his disturbingly compelling classic, “Lolita,” over the course of five breathless years, from 1948 to 1953, filling 5-by-7 cards with notes he took riding shotgun while his designated driver, his wife, Véra, drove their black Oldsmobile from Ithaca, N.Y., to Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.

In other words, at the height of the Cold War, an expatriate Russian novelist with the resonant name of Vladimir was roaming through the reddest of red states, researching a book about a jaded aristocrat’s sexual obsession with “nymphets” (a coinage the book put in the Oxford English Dictionary). The wonder is that Nabokov survived at all.”

posted by Fizz (6 comments total)

Related: ‘Nabokov in America,’ by Robert Roper [The New York Times Book Review]

The first of the Nabokovs’ many road trips, sedulously tracked by Roper, who himself “traveled several thousand miles in the East and West,” in search of the writer’s “favorite motel from the summer of ’52,” took place in May 1941 and “established the template for the summer explorations to come”: They set out on a three-week trip to California in a Pontiac driven by one of Nabokov’s language students, traveling until evening, when they checked into one of the motels they favored. Along the way, they visited many parks, where Nabokov “collected madly” when he was not studying road maps or AAA guides — where, Roper observes, “his penciled comments about establishments frequented . . . suggest an embryonic form of the parody of motel names to appear one day in ‘Lolita.’ ”

“Nabokov in America” keeps a close (and, for this nondriver, occasionally tedious) eye on the itinerary the Nabokovs followed on their road tour of the West, the better to familiarize the reader with Nabokov’s unexpected feel for the American parlance, the “vital and vulgar” New World he embraced in part to burlesque it in the pages of “Lolita.” Determined not to entangle himself in the vast edifice of documentation that has grown around Nabokov, Roper casts his account as a travelogue, one that is also a work of serious criticism, while bringing us singularly close to this writer, his indefatigable and endlessly capable wife, and their talented but restless son. (In one of many original insights, Roper suggests that the “magnetically self-possessed” Dmitri was the lucky sibling of Lolita, one whose overprotective parents made sure he didn’t get lost in the maw of predation that closes over the doomed nymphet.)

posted by Fizz at 3:43 PM on May 24, 2016 [6 favorites]

A nice post, which really ought to mention the name of the author of the linked piece, Landon Jones.
posted by languagehat at 5:34 PM on May 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

I went looking for a map of where Nabokov went. Didn't do great, but did find this. Maybe this treatment is better.
posted by Nelson at 5:37 PM on May 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

Thanks for this. I just checked out "Nabokov in America" from the library.
posted by trip and a half at 5:46 PM on May 24, 2016

Nice, breezy piece, but I'm not sure how this section got past the editors at the NYT:

Rejected in the United States, “Lolita” was first published in 1955 in England, where the London Sunday Express called it “sheer unrestrained pornography.” But the novelist Graham Greene praised it, rescuing it from the critical flames.

Lolita most certainly was not first published in England; it was published initially in Paris by the Olympia Press, whose business model largely depended on publishing pornography and "edgy" literature for the British and American tourist market, who would sneak Olympia imprints bought in the city's bookstalls out of the country in their suitcases. The novel was subsequently banned for import into the UK and only published there (and even then, controversially) in 1959. All of this is outlined in Brian Boyd's Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years.
posted by Sonny Jim at 4:55 AM on May 25, 2016 [6 favorites]

There weren't red states back then. And Republicans were isolationist. Vlad would have probably felt safer out there than in D.C.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:23 AM on May 25, 2016