Stalking Nabokovfocuses always on Vladimir Nabokov and occasionally also on me in persistent pursuit, wielding a variety of nets, in different seasons and terrains, panting with effort while he flutters free.Nabokov, “God’s own novelist himself” (William Deresiewicz), “the greatest writer ever to make a successful journey across the language frontier” (Salman Rushdie), was not only a novelist and short-story writer, but also an autobiographer, poet, dramatist, screenplay-writer, essayist, reviewer, translator, critic, scholar, lecturer, scientist, chess problem and crossword composer, and even a tennis coach and boxing coach.In pursuing him over forty years as reader and researcher, I have also played many roles: as annotator, archivist, bibliographer, biographer, butterfly namer, cataloguer, conference-goer and conference organizer, critic, documentary adviser, donee, donor, editor, expert witness, interviewee, interviewer, mentor, reviewer, teacher, translator, trustee, and more.In some of these roles I wrote the twenty-six essays here, most in the last ten years—some even incorporating material discovered only this year—as I worked, most of the time, on very different writers, from Homer and Shakespeare to Dr. Seuss (Nabokov’s friend, Ted Geisel) and Art Spiegelman.Nabokov drew details of butterfly anatomy while peering down a microscope. The portrait in Stalking Nabokov is less microscopic than kaleidoscopic: Nabokov the man, the thinker, the scientist, and above all the writer: storyteller, poet, intuitive psychologist; diarist, humorist, scenarist and stylist; on his own or in conjunction or contrast with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy and (you didn’t guess this one) Machado de Assis; and as author of Speak, Memory, Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and now, The Original of Laura.I try to tease out Nabokov’s consistency while also highlighting his variety. I sometimes show the hard lone toil of the artist and the scholar (in this case, me too), and how it relies on or resists the work of others. I show how obsessions, Nabokov’s and mine, need not preclude multiplicity and surprise.
