How to Read Nabokov: Where to Start and What to Notice

Part of: The Deep Reader

Pnin has prepared carefully for a lecture and boarded the wrong train. It is an inviting way into Nabokov: an ordinary journey gone wrong, a conspicuous traveler, and a narrator who seems to know exactly how funny it all is. Keep the traveler and the joke-teller in view together. As the book continues, you may find yourself less willing to let one dispose of the other.

Other entrances ask different things. Lolita makes eloquence morally uncomfortable from the start; Pale Fire gives us a poem in the custody of an importunate commentator; Speak, Memory brings distant periods of a life together through recollected detail. Choose the company or form you want first. Publication order can wait until you want a history of the career.

The Best Nabokov Book to Read First: Pnin

Timofey Pnin is a Russian émigré at an American college, negotiating English, schedules, and ordinary arrangements with more care than success. His speech bends unexpectedly; preparation fails to prevent mishaps. We can enjoy the absurdity and still feel the effort required to get through a day as the man whose accent and mannerisms give everybody something to notice.

Memories and attachments gradually change the scale of the comedy. The people amused by Pnin do not all know what he has lost, or what a small arrangement may mean to him. Attend to where their estimate ends. The narrator's confident tone belongs among the impressions to be examined.

Travel, teaching, and a dinner give you enough to follow without advance research. Let a later scene change an earlier description, then return to it. The first joke may still be funny when you know more about its subject, though you may hear the teller differently.

Start with Lolita if you want the pressure of a self-defending voice, or with Pale Fire if the arrangement of a book is part of what attracts you to it. Pnin's advantage is a more manageable initial situation. Ease of entry is a good enough reason to choose it; there is no need to pretend all three books offer the same experience.

How to Read a Nabokov Sentence Without Worshiping It

Listen for where a sentence spends its care. Humbert, who narrates his sexual abuse of a child in Lolita, can linger over the textures of his desire and hurry past damage. The sound may absorb you while an action gives you reason to resist the account. Keep the two responses available. Admiration for a verbal feat does not require granting its speaker the attention he asks to receive.

Hermann in Despair is quicker to advertise his artistry. He builds his story around a man he takes for his double, offering his confidence as a reason to trust the perception. Compare the particulars with that estimate. His praise of the performance is itself part of the performance you are reading.

When a detail recurs, look at its new company. A different speaker or occasion may make an earlier gesture harder to understand in the same way. A few exact returns will reward you sooner than a notebook full of symbols whose local work remains unclear.

Use a dictionary when a word keeps you from following an action or image. A passing foreign phrase can often wait until the scene is complete. Mark it lightly, keep the people straight, and consult the reference when it changes what you can see happening. An annotated edition can help without setting the pace of every page.

The Voice Path: Despair, Lolita, and Pale Fire

The voice route can run Pnin → Despair → Lolita. Hermann advertises a talent we can test; Humbert makes the attraction of his telling harder to separate from our resistance to it. Reading both gives you two particular kinds of company, rather than a general lesson that narrators sometimes lie.

Pale Fire gives that resistance a physical arrangement. Shade's poem stands beside Kinbote's foreword, notes, and index, and the commentator's interests keep competing with the lines. Read the poem continuously first if you want Shade uninterrupted. Or follow notes as they attract you, keeping a bookmark in the verse. On either route, returning to the lines will show where the note began to supply a subject of its own.

Keep the object being defended in view: Hermann's double, Humbert's desire, Kinbote's claim upon a poem. The shared label “unreliable” is less revealing than what each speaker needs the next sentence to make us believe.

The Memory Path: Speak, Memory, Sebastian Knight, and The Gift

For exile, recollection, and an artist's formation, go from Pnin to Speak, Memory. Childhood, family, and butterflies supply precise memories whose arrangement joins periods far apart. Notice when the detail itself returns and when it is the adult writer's placing of two incidents that makes them illuminate each other.

In Chapter 1, section 3, General Kuropatkin makes a sea from matches for the young Nabokov, changing calm into storm. Fifteen years later, during the father's flight from Bolshevik-held St. Petersburg, the disguised general asks him for a light. Follow both encounters before interpreting the match. Their placement within one section brings the powerful childhood visitor beside the fugitive. The match trick has not caused the history; memory has found an object through which their altered positions can meet.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight turns the wish to recover a life into a fictional undertaking: a half-brother has papers, recollections, and other people's accounts from which to write a novelist's biography. The Gift then opens a longer apprenticeship in émigré Berlin. After Speak, Memory, you can hear a different kind of pressure when a fictional young writer tries to make literature from his company and surroundings.

The Artifice Path: The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, and Bend Sinister

Choose The Defense if you want to follow a chess player's brilliance reorganizing his dealings with ordinary life. Invitation to a Beheading offers a more theatrical strangeness, in which social rules seem intelligible chiefly to the people enforcing them. Either can be a first Russian-period novel. Knowing the American books is no admission requirement.

Bend Sinister continues into dictatorship and grief. Its padograph imitates personal handwriting, providing a concrete way into the regime's treatment of individuality. Watch who uses a copy and what has been preserved when it is allowed to stand for a person. Nabokov Before AI follows that question farther.

When to Read Ada, or Ardor

Save Ada, or Ardor until the density sounds attractive in itself. Invented geography, family relations, layered dates, and allusions demand a longer settling-in than the earlier suggestions. A few notes may help. Other Nabokov books can give you comparisons when you want to decide whether a particular elaboration has earned its place.

You are free to find it overworked. Ask what the detail adds to the experience of this scene, keeping admiration answerable to the pages. Nabokov's own close attention could coexist with unfair dismissal, as The Blind Spot in Nabokov's Perfect Taste examines through his judgments of other writers. Reverence is unnecessary preparation for reading him well.

A Seven-Book Nabokov Reading Order for Beginners

Here is one seven-book route. Each stage offers a different pleasure; stop or branch when another book attracts you more strongly.

1. Pnin — follow the comic mishaps alongside the narrator’s changing account of the man who suffers them.

2. Despair — compare Hermann’s confidence in his double with the evidence he gives us.

3. Speak, Memory — notice how the arrangement of recollections connects different periods of a life.

4. Lolita — attend to Humbert’s verbal skill and the feelings his account neglects.

5. Invitation to a Beheading — follow a prisoner through a theatrical world whose rules remain obscure to him.

6. Pale Fire — read the poem and compare it with the stories its commentator attaches to it.

7. Ada, or Ardor — allow time for the family history, invented world, and allusions to accumulate.

After Speak, Memory, you can leave this route for The Defense, Laughter in the Dark, and The Gift. Bring Pale Fire forward if the poem and commentary sound irresistible now. The list exists to make choosing easier, not to postpone the book you want until you have completed its supposed preparation.

Questions That Arise While Reading

Do I have to understand every allusion?

No. First recover the speaker, action, and detail over which the sentence has lingered. Look up an allusion when it changes those. A further layer of wit may be a pleasure to save for the next reading. You can finish a scene before learning everything its author knew.

Must I read Pale Fire’s poem before its commentary?

Reading the poem first gives Shade a sustained hearing. Following notes from the outset lets Kinbote interrupt it more often. His foreword's own instructions are part of his attempt to manage the book, so hear the advice as something this person is doing. Two bookmarks are useful whichever route you try.

How do I separate the narrator from Nabokov?

Attribute the judgment to the speaker, then put the action, dialogue, or document beside it. An event can be reported accurately and given a self-serving meaning. In Lolita, Humbert's admissions belong to the same account as his enchantments; accepting one particular report need not oblige you to accept his estimate of it.

How can I notice someone the narrator pushes aside?

Remember a wish she speaks or a practical freedom she is denied. Keep it available when Humbert turns toward his own feelings. Where Dolores has not spoken, resist filling the silence with a complete mind invented on her behalf.

Does the English edition matter?

Pnin, Lolita, Pale Fire, and Bend Sinister were written in English. For Speak, Memory, choose the revised An Autobiography Revisited, the version discussed here. The earlier Russian novels arrive in English through translations, several made with Nabokov’s participation or revised by him. Check the title and translator on your edition’s title page: The Defense also appears as The Luzhin Defense. Keep your own edition’s chapter divisions and page numbers when making notes; a quotation’s sound belongs to the English version you are reading.

After your first book, try the opening again before moving on. Pnin's journey can remain comic while what you have learned of him makes the narrator's confidence less comfortable company. You will have a different reason to notice how the joke is told.

Sources

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, revised text © 1967; Vintage International digital edition, eISBN 9780307787736, Chapter 1, section 3. Digitized text.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, Lancer Books, undated U.S. edition, Foreword, especially its concluding reading directions. Digitized copy.

Vladimir Nabokov: Books and Biography, Penguin Random House, for titles and English editions.

Diana Bruk, “Nabokov: What to Read”, Russian Life, April 22, 2014; Brian Boyd, “The 10 Best Vladimir Nabokov Books”, Publishers Weekly, November 6, 2015, for further reading routes.