Stalking Nabokov by Brian Boyd (PDF)

Description

At the age of twenty-one, Brian Boyd wrote a thesis on Vladimir Nabokov that the famous author called “brilliant.” After gaining exclusive access to the writer’s archives, he wrote a two-part, award-winning biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991). This collection features essays written by Boyd since completing the biography, incorporating material he gleaned from his research as well as new discoveries and formulations.Boyd confronts Nabokov’s life, career, and legacy; his art, science, and thought; his subtle humor and puzzle-like storytelling; his complex psychological portraits; and his inheritance from, reworking of, and affinities with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Machado de Assis. Boyd offers new ways of reading Nabokov’s best English-language works: Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and the unparalleled autobiography, Speak, Memory, and he discloses otherwise unknown information about the author’s world. Sharing his personal reflections, Boyd recounts the adventures, hardships, and revelations of researching Nabokov’s biography and his unusual finds in the archives, including materials still awaiting publication. The first to focus on Nabokov’s metaphysics, Boyd cautions against their being used as the key to unlock all of the author’s secrets, showing instead the many other rooms in Nabokov’s castle of fiction that need exploring, such as his humor, narrative invention, and psychological insight into characters and readers alike. Appreciating Nabokov as novelist, memoirist, poet, translator, scientist, and individual, Boyd helps us understand more than ever the author’s multifaceted genius.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Brian Boyd is a Kiwi and the number one authority on Nabokov. How unlikely. He is now working on a Karl Popper bio. Can’t wait for that (not kidding, though I am a little incredulous; it is such a contrast — apart from some biographic similarities like the escape from tyranny).This book collects essays on Nab, mostly written after Boyd’s outstanding two volume Nabokov biography had been published.It is a delight and a must to the unreformed fan. No writer has given me, personally, more pleasure than Nabokov, over the years, and Boyd is a great stalker.This book is a bit of a market skimming exercise, obviously, repackaging previously published material. The essays are speeches from various occasions, or contributions to discussions with other Nabophiles, and similar stuff. We learn a lot about Boyd’s interaction with Vera and with Nab’s son. He never met the man himself, due to Nab’s untimely death.On the other hand, I cannot honestly recommend it to a non-fan. It is just too specialized. If you are not a fan, don’t start trying to become one here.A particularly rocky subject about Nab is the lamentable probability that he was a creationist when he dealt with his scientific world. His zoological work as a lepidopterist was very technical and fact- focused, but he did not abstain from one or the other thought. A few times he made distinctly anti-Darwinian statements, generally about mimicry.His attitude was based on some kind of metaphysical heresy about the beyond. In fact, he seems to have believed in ghosts, or say, better, the possibility of communication between our world and another. He didn’t go as far as Alfred R. Wallace, who participated in spiritualist sessions during his last years. Nabokov kept it well hidden in his books.Boyd himself disagrees with Nab’s metaphysics, but sees no reason to reduce his admiration for the fiction writer. Neither do I.

⭐I’m a devoted fan of Nabokov’s later work, written in English. Having read Boyd’s ‘Nabokov: American Years’, part criticism part biography, and overall an amazing study, I could barely wait for this book’s release.Diligent research on Nabokov’s work & criticism, conducted over dozens of years by Boyd, is revealed in a collection of essays quite varied in the disciplines & approaches employed (science-Lolita parallels, translating/editing Nabokov, Nabokov Scholarship, to name a few). That being said, since the selection covers all of Nabokov’s work, his life, at times his literary criticism, and other subjects, sometimes one longs for the more focused, specialized approach of ‘American Years’, then again, since each essay stands on its own, Boyd’s eclecticism doesn’t get bothering.None of the essays included, so far as I can tell, have been previously published in book-form, so if you’re already a Boyd devotee, have no qualms buying this book.If you’re new to Boyd and looking for a point of entry, I’d suggest beginning with Boyd’s ‘American Years’ and following up with this.

⭐I was distressed when I read through the other reviews of this wonderful book: I wonder if they even read it?Boyd’s essays are gathered from various sources, each with a distinct theme based on the lecture he was delivering or the focus he treats: they are the gentlest form of stalking imaginable–no Kinbote falling off the eaves here…Brian is and shall likely remain the definitive scholar on Vladimir’s life and work. Anything he produces resonates with his close relationship with the Nabokov clan, and intimate knowledge of Vladimir’s oevre: had Boswell left a festschift of his thought about Samuel Johnson, it would rank right up there with his Life, and I have no doubt this volume will endure similarly.It stands proudly along with a hundred or more other volumes I have written by Vladimir, and a growing body of monographs, peripheral studies, “and much, much more!”

⭐Some of it is great. Some of it is boring and time wasting. It’s a collection of Boyd’s writings about Nabokov and, for instance, when he details how he has his students (Boyd’s) write Lolita screenplays, I’m annoyed and bored. Why include this? It has really so little to do with Nabokov and so much to do with how Boyd teaches. I don’t care. I should have gotten the REAL biography (two volumes) he wrote. Buying this was a mistake.

⭐Boyd’s 1400-page two-volume Nabokov biography reads more quickly than this compilation of essays. Several entries are of interest, but Boyd seems to have adopted Nabokov’s penchant for long and complex sentences, without quite achieving Nabokov’s wit or brilliance. Perhaps he should study ee cummings next?

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