A man for all seasons

Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita. By Robert Roper.Bloomsbury; 354 pages; $28 and £20.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV never doubted his own talent: “By the age of 14 or 15 I had read or reread all Tolstoy in Russian, all Shakespeare in English and all Flaubert in French—besides hundreds of other books.” From that foundation came a stream of literary criticism, translations, short stories, poetry and fiction—including, of course, “Lolita”, one of the most controversial novels of the 20th century.

Did other authors match this talent? Nabokov mostly thought not: Proust and Pushkin were to be admired, but certainly not Hemingway, Faulkner or Boris Pasternak (whose “Dr Zhivago” was, in Nabokov’s opinion, a Soviet plot to earn foreign exchange). In the end, Nabokov even scorned Edmund Wilson, an American critic and author who had been his friend and literary and social ally for almost all his time in America, from his flight with his Jewish wife from the Nazis in Europe in 1940 to his tax-efficient departure for Switzerland two decades later.

Robert Roper, for whom Nabokov is “the great python of art” with his “bulging repasts” of Russian, French and English literature, balances Nabokov’s arrogance with his sense of fun and eccentricity (no other great writer has been a serious lepidopterist, travelling more than 200,000 miles...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1TxxRcC