Stalking Nabokov by Brian Boyd

of Laura and my later reversal I describe in detail in chapter 26 of this volume, “A Book Burner Recants.” What else has been found in Nabokov’s papers after his death and his prolific life? Why should I of all people be asked to write about the new or little-known parts of Nabokov’s literary legacy, when I recommended to Véra and Dmitri, after reading the manuscript of The Original of Laura , that they should destroy it? And what difference can works published or collected since Nabokov’s death make to our sense of the writer and the man?
    I wrote my M.A. thesis on Nabokov and ended up sending it to him (no one, he had complained, had solved the puzzle of Transparent Things ; I had, and wanted to show him it could be solved independently). Véra returned the thesis with Nabokov’s encomium and one marginal cross and three corrections in his blunt pencil hand: my first treasured sample of a handwriting that would become almost as familiar to me as my own. Soon after, I started a Ph.D. thesis on Nabokov, having become bored with the one I had begun on John Barth. In the summer of 1976, visiting Europe for the first time and all but resolved to switch from Barth to Nabokov’s Ada , I visited Montreux, where Nabokov had been living since 1961. I ventured inside the imposing Montreux Palace Hotel and left a note for Nabokov but did not dare ask to meet him. I did not know that already that summer he was in hospital and would never fully recover. I can remember how stunned I was, eleven months into my thesis, to hear of his death on July 2, 1977. In photographs he still looked fit, striding up mountain slopes in pursuit of butterflies. His prose seemed invulnerable. How could death have claimed him ?
    In the course of my research, the interlibrary-loan service at the University of Toronto helped me glean all Nabokov’s published work I could lay my hands on, including even his first book, published when he was seventeen. Although the one known copy in the Americas had recently been sold to Harvard for $10,000, an interlibrary-loan copy arrived for me by ordinary mail from the Lenin Library in Moscow. Some of the material I gathered then has still not appeared in book form, has not been consulted by even some of the best Nabokov scholars, yet offers priceless insights into his thinking and wonderful instances of his imagery. Take this review of a book by a now-forgotten philosopher that Nabokov wrote for a now-defunct New York newspaper in his first year in the United States. He notes
    the old pitfall of that dualism which separates the ego from the non-ego, a split which, strangely enough, is intensified the stronger the reality of the world is stressed…. [W]hile the brain still pulses one cannot escape the paradox that man is intimately conscious of Nature because he is walled in himself and separated from her. The human mind is a box with no tangible lid, sides, or bottom, and still it is a box, and there is no earthly method of getting out of it and remaining in it at the same time. 1
    The excitement of discovering passages like this kept me searching for far-flung Nabokoviana all through my dissertation years. When I came to write the biography, an uncollected interview offered the ideal epigraph for the book, in this succinct and luminous metaphor: “ ‘What surprises you most in life?’… ‘the miracle of consciousness: that sudden window opening onto a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being.’ ” 2 Nabokov’s reflections on literature and life and on his own work and thought in his collected interviews have proved fascinating for readers, memorable for dictionaries of quotations, and invaluable for critics. Now, more than thirty years after I started amassing stray Nabokoviana, I am delighted to be preparing an edition of his uncollected prose and interviews, which should be published in the next few years as Think, Write, Speak —after the opening sentence of his foreword to his own