Uh perfect book | Profile

It was next to the bed, the place where the books that are always left to read later go. She could have stayed there and met a fate similar to that of the author. Written in Russian in 1965, published in French in 1996 and converted into Spanish in 2008 by Pedro B. Rey for La Compañía, Nabokov y su Lolita, by Nina Berberova, returned from that cursed library only because it has less than a hundred pages and he was looking for A small book to take to the cafe.

I found a perfect book, if the adjective can be applied to books, but this one is intelligent, substantial and of a clarity rarely found in an essay. Berberova (Saint Petersburg, 1901; Philadelphia, 1993) got to know Nabokov well and his books better, which they describe as pillars of modern literature (at least, of what was understood as such in the middle of the last century) from four principles: “The intuition of a dissociated world, the opening of the floodgates of the subconscious, the uninterrupted flow of consciousness and the new poetics arising from symbolism.” To understand what Berberova is talking about, let’s quote this passage: “Once the doors of the subconscious were open, Strindberg has not felt any visible need to close them again. Perhaps for this reason he has not aged, unlike Ibsen, who spent his life sitting behind his ‘iron curtain’ without ever suspecting that there was a way to get around it and go speak in front of it”. I believe that it is enough to understand the grace, the depth and the lucidity of a writing.

Berberova analyzes the evolution of Nabokov’s work from Russian to English and from classicism to modernity, and affirms that the three books that mark a turning point in his prose, before breaking out in Russian in The Gift and then in English in Lolita , son The Eye, Despair and Invited to a beheading. All three have always cost me. Instead, she sees Pnin, perhaps my favorite Nabokov novel, as a step backwards, a belated concession to realism. Berberova is so eloquent that she made me think that she should read again the Nabokov that is more difficult for me.

Nabokov and his Lolita is, among many things, a reading program, but a triple program, as is clear in the essential afterword by Hubert Nyssen, the French editor who met her in 1985 when Berberova was over 80 and a professor of Russian who lived in Princeton, whose literary work was unknown and who in the circle of Parisian exiles had passed for just a pretty face reciting other people’s poems (and which the political police of the French CP had no interest in editing either after having recounted the trial around Victor Kravchenko). Hubert Nyssen translated and published Beberova, whom we can read today in Spanish (I looked in and read a story called Las señoritas de San Petersburgo, which reveals a splendid writer). Nyssen suggests that Nabokov and his Lolita is a veiled and elegant protest for not having been the Russian writer of her generation recognized by the general public. She would have to find out by reading her work, which includes an autobiography with a splendid title: The underlining is mine. And you should also read Nyssen’s memoirs as editor. When I get the books I won’t leave them next to the bed.