Hero and dragon alike dream the creative dream and either shape that dream into immutable art or are destroyed by it in a mutable world-Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev and John Shade on the one hand Aleksandr Luzhin and Hermann, the doomed writer of Despair, on the other. The central figure of Nabokov's novels is the artist, the man of sensitivity and imagination. He is clearly and always the maker of these books, the serious and deceptive artist with whom we must play the game. Speakers and voices may vary from volume to volume, but the maker's hand is consistently firm as the hallmarks of his steady and continuing vision remain clear and sharp from first to last. There are eight novels and a novella in Russian and five novels in English, and these fourteen volumes, for all their being in two languages and the products of two literatures, are of a piece, forming together a real canon, a multi-mirrored labyrinth of reflecting and repeating dreams and nightmares, disasters and delights. And his novels are genuinely Russian and as genuinely American-The Gift is, to my knowledge, the best modern Russian novel in both manner and matter, and Pale Fire is, to my mind, one of the best novels in English to have been written in this century. He is, in fact, his own double-at once the two greatest living novelists, himself the mirror of his own reflection. He is, with Boris Pasternak, one of the two greatest Russian novelists of his time, and he is, with William Faulkner, one of the two great American novelists of that same time. Nabokov's position in literary life is unique he has no double in recorded literary history. I should, then, prefer to make of this piece something more and perhaps less than a review-a celebration of the master's latest gift and a grateful appreciation of his plexed artistry and combinational delights. To approach Nabokov's novels with anything less than complete humility is not only an act of arrogance but of foolishness, for if the novelist's art, as Nabokov suggested in his autobiographical memoir, Speak, Memory, is to compose elaborate and significant puzzles in which "the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world," too often even his most dedicated and enthusiastic critics lose the game disastrously and are left red-faced and gasping for breath.
The occasion for these pages is the publication of a newly translated and revised version of Vladimir Nabokov's Russian novel, Despair (Otchayanie, originally published in Berlin in 1936). Vladimir Nabokov (Playboy, January, 1964) Because, of course, art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
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