Hurricane Lolita

Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov’s nostalgic memoir, reflects on his life from the age of three to 41, taking us from early-20th-century Russia, soon to be engulfed by revolution, to Europe at the start of the second world war. He planned a sequel to it, based on his American years, but Speak On, Memory was never written, partly because much of that experience had found an outlet in his novels. As Robert Roper argues in his literary biography, it was America that made Nabokov the master we now admire. Nabokov in America, a detailed account of the 20 years the writer spent there, revisits some of the less widely known facts and draws a number of fresh analogies.

Nabokov, his wife Véra and their son Dmitri arrived in America in 1940, having fled Germany via France: Véra’s Jewishness meant they could no longer stay in Europe. America, according to Roper, had been an ‘invitation to adventure’ to Nabokov since reading as a boy The Headless Horseman, a western by Mayne Reid. Growing up in an Anglophile family, he learned to read in English before he could do so in Russian, and although he wrote mainly in Russian in the first two decades of his career, his move to America signalled a new start.

One of the highlights of this biography is Nabokov’s passion for butterfly collecting: a talented lepidopterist, he found a rich terrain for his passion in the American West, where the family travelled often and extensively. Butterflies punctuate the book, framing Nabokov’s literary work, as the biographer meticulously follows the writer’s progress in the new environment.

At first Nabokov was not entirely happy with his English — a quaint product of the Old World — and it took him some years to master it.