Nabokov's switch from writing in Russian to writing in English is a complicated story intimately linked with his adoption of a new (American) identity. It must have been a painful switch, as Nabokov, who was famous for his showmanship, always liked to stress. It was, he said, 'like learning to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion'.60 Throughout his life Nabokov complained about the handicap of writing in English - perhaps too often to be totally believed (he once confessed in a letter to a friend that his 'best work was written in English').61 Even at the height of his literary prowess he argues, in his 1956 afterword to Lolita, that it had been his 'private tragedy' to
abandon my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses - the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions - which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.62
But even if such claims were a form of affectation, his achievement is undeniable. It is extraordinary that a writer who has been hailed as the supreme stylist of the modern English language should have written it as a foreigner. As his wife Vera put it, not only had he 'switched from a very special and complex brand of Russian, all his own, which he had perfected over the years into something unique and peculiar to
him', but he had embraced 'an English which he then proceeded to wield and bend to his will until it, too, became under his pen something it had never been before in its melody and flexibility'. She came to the conclusion that what he had done was substitute for his passionate affair with the Russian language un manage de raison which 'as it sometimes happens with a manage de raison - became in turn a tender love affair'.63
Until the Revolution destroyed his plans, Nabokov had set out to become the next Pushkin. In later life he played upon this image of the stymied genius, even if in fact his English writing style, which he had developed since the age of five, had always been as good as, if not better than, his Russian one. But once he was in exile Nabokov had a sense of writing in a void. Liberated from the Soviet regime, he began to feel that the freedom he enjoyed was due to his working in vacuo - without readers or a public context in which to write - so that 'the whole thing acquired a certain air of fragile unreality'.64 (Tsvetaeva expressed a similar despair - although in her case, without another language to fall back on, it signalled a more profound private tragedy: 'From a world where my poems were as necessary as bread I came into a world where no one needs poems, neither my poems nor any poems, where poems are needed like - dessert: if anyone - needs - dessert…')65
The need for an audience was the fundamental motive of Nabokov's switch. As he himself explained, a writer 'needs some reverberation, if not a response'.66 His Russian-language reading public was reduced in size with every passing year, as the children of the emigres became assimilated into the culture in which they lived. It was virtually impossible for a young Russian writer like Nabokov to make a living from writing alone, and the competition was intense. 'To get into literature is like squeezing into an overcrowded trolley car. And once inside, you do your best to push off any new arrival who tries to hang on', complained another writer, Georgy Ivanov.67
Berlin was a particularly difficult place to live, as thousands of Russians fled the city after Hitler's rise to power in 1933. The Nabokovs stayed in the German capital. They lived in poverty - Vera working as a secretary and Nabokov giving private lessons in English and in French. But it was obvious that they, too, would have to leave. Vera was Jewish, and in 1936 the man who had assassinated Nabokov's father, Sergei Taboritsky, was appointed second-in-command of
Hitler's department for emigre affairs. Nabokov searched in desperation for an academic post in London or New York, anywhere but Hitler's Germany, and settled in the end for a move to Paris in 1938. From there the Nabokovs made arrangements to go to New York in the spring of 1940, just two weeks before the Germans reached Paris. In their studio apartment near the Bois de Boulogne Nabokov locked himself in the bathroom, laid a suitcase across the bidet and typed out his entry ticket to the English literary world: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, published in New York in 1941.
Nabokov's passage to New York had been arranged by Alexandra Tolstoy, the novelist's daughter and the head of the Tolstoy Foundation, which had just been set up to look after the interests of Russian emigres in America. The outbreak of the Second World War had brought about a flood of well-known refugees from Hitler's Europe: Einstein, Thomas Mann, Huxley, Auden, Stravinsky, Bartok and Chagall - all made new homes for themselves in the USA. New York was swollen with Russian emigres. The literary capital of Russia in America, its daily Russian newspaper, Novoe russkoe slovo (New Russian Word) had a national readership of half a million. The Nabokovs settled in 'a dreadful little flat' on West 87th Street, near Central Park. As a writer Nabokov was not well known among the emigres in the USA. Until the scandal and success of Lolita, completed in 1952 but not published until 1955, he struggled to survive from his writing. Like the hero of his novel Pnin (1957), he was forced to make his living from temporary lecturing jobs at, among other universities, Stanford, Wellesley and Cornell. Not that his financial hardship reduced Nabokov's considerable pride. When Rachmaninov sent the struggling writer some of his old clothes, Nabokov, who was something of a dandy and the son of possibly the best-dressed man in the entire history of St Petersburg,* returned the suits to the composer, complaining that they had been tailored 'in the period of the Prelude'.68
* Nabokov pere was famous for his finely tailored English suits, which he wore, without self-consciousness, in the Duma assembly, where many of the rural deputies were dressed in peasant clothes (A. Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode (New York, 1952), P. 2.70). His sartorial extravagance was a common source of anecdotes in pre-revolutionary Petersburg. It was even said that he sent his underpants to England to be washed.
'America is my home now,' Nabokov said in interviews in 1964. 'I am an American writer.'69 Despite his sometimes rather scathing portraits of the USA (most notoriously in Lolita), it appears the sentiment was genuinely held. Nabokov liked to play the real American. Having lost the Nabokov inheritance in the Old World way, through revolution, he had earned his fortune in the New World way: by hard work and brains.70 The bounty of Lolita was a badge of his success as an American, and he wore it with great pride. 'This is the only known case in history when a European pauper ever became his own American uncle', writes an envious but admiring reviewer of the Russian writer and emigre Vadim (read: Nabokov) in Look at the Harlequins! (1974).71 Nabokov would not tolerate any criticism of America. He was a patriot. Throughout his life he kept the oath which he had sworn when he became a US citizen in 1945. When Gallimard produced a cover design for the French edition of Pnin showing the professor standing on the US flag, Nabokov objected to the Stars and Stripes 'being used as a floor coverage or a road surfacing'.72