Vladimir Nabokov, Literary Refugee
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of ages, the history of gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read, but at the miracle of it's being readable."
- Pale Fire
The regime did not allow literature it disapproved of and Dr. Zhivago was not a work they approved of. It was not published until someone contrived to smuggle it out.
The Soviet Union had an extremely vigorous censorship regime. Even the UK did until the 1960s and the Lady Chatterly trial.
Interestingly, while Nabokov learned to write perfect English, he never was able to speak it.
Lots of interviews on YouTube suggest otherwise... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldpj_5JNFoA
If you already knew that Nabokov's interviews consisted entirely of remarks prepared in advance... why would you post that as a counterexample to "he wasn't able to speak perfect English"? That's the whole reason he prepared his responses.
Choirs frequently perform songs in foreign languages; nobody takes that as evidence that the members are able to speak those languages.
The reason Nabokov wouldn't speak in public without index cards was not ignorance but perfectionism. Index cards were his instrument—don't forget that he wrote his novels on those cards as well. For Nabokov, speaking in public without his index cards would be like not being properly dressed, or maybe dressed at all. Plenty of writers have that anxiety, including ones who never leave their native language.
You're still right, though. Nabokov's spoken English was nothing compared to his writing, and his genius would have made him painfully aware of that. The OP contains a partial version of this famous quote: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English..." The key word there is tragedy. To him his English was second-rate, and he would know.
That frames it elegantly, thanks.
Holy shit, that was dang
> To avoid speaking like a child in public, Nabokov took great pains to prepare his every word. "Throughout my academic ascent in America from lean lecturer to Full Professor, I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand and not held under my eyes on the bright-lit lectern."
> When it came to giving interviews, Nabokov was horrified by the notion of sitting back and having a casual chat with a reporter. "It has been tried at least twice in the old days," he writes, "and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance. Nowadays I take every precaution to ensure a dignified beat of the mandarin's fan. The interviewer's questions have to be sent to me in writing, answered by me in writing, and reproduced verbatim. Such are the three absolute conditions."
> So the excerpt above from a 1969 interview with the British journalist James Mossman should be understood as a carefully prepared performance.
Note how in the interview you posted, he frequently gets stuck on his prepared lines, resulting in sequences like or-or-or-or-or-or or the-the-the-the-the. (Yes, disfluencies are common in all speakers. But those disfluencies are not typical of English speakers, and reflect a different problem.)
The Russian aristocracy was extremely multilingual.
Certainly a lot of authors have extensively re-written their own work in galleys--if you poke around, you can see photographs of some of Proust's editing of his own work.
As for Nabokov, he had, like many other famous authors, a contentious relationship with editors.
> By “editor” I suppose you mean proofreader. Among these I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is. But I have also come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would attempt to “make suggestions” which I countered with a thunderous “stet!”
It seems his wife did a lot of editing:
> Nabokov wrote Lolita while travelling on butterfly-collection trips in the western United States that he undertook every summer. Véra acted as "secretary, typist, editor, proofreader, translator and bibliographer; his agent, business manager, legal counsel and chauffeur; his research assistant, teaching assistant and professorial understudy"; when Nabokov attempted to burn unfinished drafts of Lolita, Véra stopped him. He called her the best-humored woman he had ever known.”
What work was further done at the various publishing houses I don’t know, but the first edition, published by Olympia, was “riddled with typos,” which would indicate little additional editing was done for this edition. The typos were corrected for the American publication.
It feels like these publishers are somewhat converging, doing a rather good job connecting (paying) excellent writers with the high end of readership, with not too much deference to the material being a perfect fit for their respective wheelhouses.