Say it with me now: Vluh-DEEM-ear Nuh-BOK-off. It's oddly fitting that a man who used fifteen different pseudonyms over his lifetime, fled various governments, and filled his autobiography with fiction has had his name mispronounced so often (not least by me and others unfamiliar with Russian), upholding, both posthumously and unintentionally, the facade of fiction behind which he hid during most of his working life.
Shown to us by PhD student Michael Rodgers of Strathclyde Unviersity, this mask was finely sculpted and covered every public appearance the writer made. The talk in the Scotland-Russia Forum last Friday filled the intimate space with lively discussion from those both familiar and unfamiliar with the writer. Absorbed but still sceptical, Rodgers took us through Nabokov's early, privileged upbringing to an adulthood spent all over the globe.
Raised in a wealthy trilingual household, the young Nabokov was appreciating poetry in Russian, English and French by age ten, and was lead into literature from a number of different cultures. Best known for writing Lolita, a novel in which an older man finds himself in love with a twelve-year-old girl, Nabokov's life was shared between his native Russia, Europe and the United States, where he eventually gained citizenship and a job as a popular lecturer at both Harvard and Cornell University.
Nabokov was a synaesthete, seeing words and numbers as different colours, a polymath, a lecturer and a lepidopterist (collector of butterflies). He was also by turns hugely arrogant and bordering on self-deprecating. He insisted upon having interview questions in advance for preparation, since he felt that he “thought like a genius, wrote like a distinguished author, and talked like a child”, and that he used a “second-rate brand of English”, both of which can be disproved by the simple fact that his English-language works are among some of the most highly regarded in the world. These over-modest claims are balanced with his attitude towards his contemporaries, his sit-down, shut-up style of lecturing, and notes in his autobiography which name the only author who has really influenced him as one of his own fictional characters, most likely based on himself. The public image of this prolific writer was ever-changing, questionable, and kept flitting in and out of view.
His use of pseudonyms, too, showed a separation between the self and the outside world. It has been suggested that Nabokov changed his name frequently while publishing poems and stories to trick the harshest of critics and test the most avid of fans, both of which he pulled off with ease. Impossible to pin down, the Russian-born American with his celebrated 'second-rate' English was apparently self-sufficient enough to not need his familial name, taking at one time the name of a kind of mythological fire-bird instead of his own. Finally, he reduced his name to simply V.N in order to make a cameo in one of his later works, by which point its meaning was clear, and Vladimir Nabokov's name was well-known, if not, technically, well-pronounced.
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