Stalking Nabokov Read Online Free Page A

Nabokovs’ reputation for old-fashioned formality, and sitting in the three-piece suit that my parents had bought in the hope of mending my ways and that I now, in all my gaucheness and diffidence, thought necessary for the occasion, I felt as comfortable as a giraffe on a surfboard. It took years for the awe and the awkwardness to wear off.
    The problems of finding the materials and of trying to compensate for the unevenness of the record can occupy a biographer for many months. But then you have to write. Although at the research stage you are desperate to read every scrap, to find out every fact, you also know that readers won’t want to read about all these facts any more than you will want to write about them all. You want your readers to have the satisfying illusion of completeness, of unreserved disclosure, of unobstructed access, but you also want them never to be bored: believe it or not, you want to be as brief as possible.
    The tension between comprehensiveness and concision is one of many you have to harness as you write. As a biographer, you have to resolve the conflicts between the urge to collect and the urge to select; between the need to set the scene and the need to advance the action; between the desire to explain and the desire to let things speak for themselves; between the impulse to look ahead for distant outcomes or back for remote causes and the impulse to treat the present moment in its own right; between the need to provide as much shape and structure as you can and the need to leave room for life’s unruly details; between your wish to remain objective and your knowledge that every phrase creates and colors what you want your readers to see; between allying with your subject and asserting your independence; between attention to your material and attention to your reader.
    And in writing the life of someone whose claim on our interest was not in the drama of battle or courts, like Charlemagne, but in the inner drama that unfolds at a quiet desk, you have to find some rhythm to move between the inner and the outer, the work and the life, the timeless image or idea and time ticking away.
    But time has ticked away long enough. Thank you, Seligenstadt, for the honor of the Einhard Prize, thank you for bringing me here to talk to you, and thank you for listening.

4. The Nabokov Biography and the Nabokov Archive
    Véra Nabokov invited me in 1979 to catalog her husband’s archives in Montreux, hoping that they could then more easily be sold to an American institution. Buyers approached in the 1980s offered too little. By the beginning of the 1990s, the New York Public Library was on the point of purchasing the papers for the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, famous especially for its Joyce and Woolf collections. As details were being settled, Dmitri Nabokov became anxious about finally parting with his father’s archives. Rodney Phillips, director of the Berg Collection, and Lisa Browar, director of the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Libraries at the New York Public Library, fetched me from New Zealand in June 1991 to meet them in Montreux to help reassure Dmitri. Dmitri especially feared further piracy of Russian Nabokov materials by publishers and scholars from Russia. I suggested that the Russian materials in the archive should remain inaccessible for as long as it took for Russians to respect copyright, and the deal went ahead.
    Once the archive was installed in New York, the New York Public Library announced the acquisition with an exhibition, a dinner, and a talk that I gave at the Celeste Bartos Forum in the Central Research Library on October 16, 1991. I wanted to suggest how the papers now in the Berg made it possible to understand Nabokov’s life and works in new ways and how the papers’ preservation by Véra—she had died earlier that year—could serve as a new lens not only on Nabokov’s career but also on her dedication to it.
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