The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

A startling and revelatory examination of Nabokov's life and works — notably Pale Fire and Lolita — bringing new insight into one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic authors.

Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fleeing France with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis. He repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering to write artful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in the English language really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so many critics?

Using information from newly-declassified intelligence files and recovered military history, journalist Andrea Pitzer argues that far from being a proponent of art for art's sake, Vladimir Nabokov managed to hide disturbing history in his fiction — history that has gone unnoticed for decades. Nabokov emerges as a kind of documentary conjurer, spending the most productive decades of his career recording a saga of forgotten concentration camps and searing bigotry, from World War I to the Gulag and the Holocaust. Lolita surrenders Humbert Humbert's secret identity, and reveals a Nabokov appalled by American anti-Semitism. The lunatic narrator of Pale Fire recalls Russian tragedies that once haunted the world. From Tsarist courts to Nazi film sets, from CIA front organizations to wartime Casablanca, the story of Nabokov's family is the story of his century — and both are woven inextricably into his fiction.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Russia, Literature, Audiobook, Criticism

432 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

I'm the author of Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World (2021), One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (2017), and The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (2013).

My writing has appeared many places in print and online, from the Washington Post and New York Review of Books to Outside, Slate, Vox, USA Today, and GQ. I founded Nieman Storyboard, the narrative nonfiction site for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

I've spoken about my work at the 92nd Street Y, Smithsonian Associates, Yale, Dartmouth, and many other places. I live in Virginia, just outside Washington, DC.

Reviews

[l · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disappointing book. Well-researched but the actual analysis was limited and consistently hampered by its idiotic thesis - that Nabokov's works deal with political themes in the same sense as Solzhenitsyn's. Pitzer begins by presenting a thoroughly outdated view of Nabokov - the stylist with nothing to say (Babel's description, iirc) and sets out to cut it down. It's a bit ??? given that anyone who has understood Lolita, or Invitation to a Beheading, or any of Nabokov's novels, will know that Nabokov has a huge deal to say on virtually everything. I think Martin Amis wrote that all Nabokov's books are about tyranny and if Martin Amis can get that... Really, the Nabokov quotation that Brian Boyd uses at the beginning of one of his Nabokov bios (and that Pitzer adds in at the very end of this book) sums it up quite nicely: "In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel-- and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride." That Nabokov, like his father, cared deeply about the traditional individual freedoms (of thought/speech/bodily integrity etc) and that his works are reflective of those values is pretty 101 stuff. Pitzer modifies her task though - deciding to uncover 'the secret history' of Nabokov's works and thus narrowing in on his references to political and historical events of the time. Unfortunately, she doesn't uncover much new material, and the stuff she does uncover, she doesn't really delve into - she basically goes 'ha! a passing reference to concentration camps in x year! you know who wrote about concentration camps? solzhenitysn!' which is a really bewildering approach to what cold have been a really interesting study.

As the book progresses, it becomes clear that Solzhenitsyn has been invoked solely because Pitzer thought that opening and closing the novel with the Nabokov-Solzhenitsyn meeting that never happened would be a good hook; Solzhenitsyn really isn't relevant. The tenuous connections that Pitzer draws between the two at random points in the book are honestly embarrassing - it's like remembering that compare-and-contrast essay you wrote in undergrad which was so hastily and sloppily written that you were actually too embarrassed to reread it and just submitted it as it was, knowing that it was a lost cause and praying for completion marks (well, I've done this if no one else has). It's unfortunate because I couldn't help but think - what if instead of trying to make some kind of unnecessary and ham-fisted point that Nabokov's books were informed by the time (whose works aren't informed by the time? and Nabokov's writing is grounded in reality - he believed in actual details, I mean he criticized a line of Garnett's W&P translation because she writes that a horse looked at a character with 'speaking eyes' and 'horses can't look at you with both eyes'... and of course he cared about Russia! and of course biographical elements found their way into his works - I don't think anyone has ever said otherwise?) she could have explored the significance of those details in the works. She could have also, instead of drawing Solzhenitsyn in, compared Nabokov's works and his politics to a Soviet writer whose work was actually comparable to Nabokov's - Andrei Sinyavsky!

I don't know, the first chapter really irritated me and I have absolutely no time for Solzhenitsyn so this might be overly critical. Pitzer also makes quite a few psychobabble-based inferences and that also set my teeth on edge.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Andrea Pitzer has made a fine book out what all readers of Nabokov know – behind the glitter, the wordplay, the baroque plots, the hauteur and hilarity is horror, the historical horror of the 20th century. This is most evident in the early novels (Invitation to a Beheading; The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; Bend Sinister; Despair), but Pitzer shows how these dark themes play out just behind the surface of the more artful novels – Lolita; Pnin; and Pale Fire. In her view, Nabokov engaged in a lifelong polemic against the evils of totalitarianism while refusing to write “political” novels and heaping scorn on those who did. She illuminates the characteristic “about-face” that occurs repeatedly in his writing: “The setup, the long arc of mordant observation or ornate beauty, gets undercut at the last moment by a phrase reframing everything that has just happened, indicting the narrator’s callousness and the reader’s collaboration with it.”

None of this is especially new, but the emphasis is. I was particularly intrigued by her explication of Nabokov’s anti-antisemitism in Lolita, in which the word “Jew” is never mentioned. Also fascinating is the uncanny history of Nova Zembla, (or Novaya Zemlya), the most dreaded camp of the Gulag but also – as Zembla – the lost kingdom of Kinbote, the crazed word-wizard of Pale Fire.

I was less captivated by her contrast of Nabokov with Solzhenitsyn, except for the final wonderful tale in which Vladimir and Vera sit waiting for the recently-exiled Soviet author in the Salon de Musique of the luxurious Montreux Palace Hotel. Apparently Solzhenitsyn drove across Switzerland, right up the grand entrance of the Hotel, then drove away. “The Nabokovs waited at the table for more than an hour before rising to go. The two men never met.”

The last three months I’ve been reading a couple grim books – Robert Gellately’s Stalin’s Curse and Vladimir Tismaneanu’s The Devil in History – recounting some of the darkest decades of the 20th Century. The horrors of Fascism and Communism are almost impossible to imagine– the incredible suffering, the millions murdered. Not exactly what I want before bed. But they deepen the point of Pitzer’s book and only make more mysterious the magic of Nabokov, who said he had only learned to recognize suffering “after the things and beings that I had most loved in the security of my childhood had been turned to ashes and shot through the heart.” It’s the art he made out of this suffering that finally astonishes, fictions both heartless and bedazzling, not quite like anything else ever written.

[Meir F. Glide · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading (and re-reading) Nabokov for more than 30 years. I love his books.
As a former prosecutor and a cynical, and practical, lawyer, I thought that I paid close attention to language and details.

Reading The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov has been a truly humbling, and exhilarating, experience in which I am reminded how risky it is to take anything for granted when I read. I marvel at the insights, historical and other, that Pitzer illuminates in Nabokov's work. It is humbling to realize how much I uncritically skimmed over that was right before my eyes.

Charles Kinbote’s journey, and his relationship with John Shade, take on new dimensions if Kinbote’s escape was not from some fictitious kingdom, but from a place of horror. If you know about Humbert Humbert’s teenage romance, his obsession with Lolita years later is placed in a different context when you realize in full the fate of her “precursor.” I can never again lazily assume that what I failed to grasp in some sentence can be safely ignored as some detached, apolitical, literary indulgence.

This book is a must-read -- and a complete joy -- for anyone who appreciates the majesty of Nabokov’s writing and his contribution to literature. I picked it up and couldn’t put it down until 3:30 a.m., when I turned the last page and wanted to start all over, this time with the corresponding Nabokov novel in my lap. Ms. Pitzer’s work is a real treasure – I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

[Donald]

This was a really fascinating read. Nabokov, often thought of as an "art for Art's sake" artist actually has been addressing some of the major events of the 20th century in his books throughout his career. I refer to the Russian Revolution, WW1 it's concentration camps which bled over to WW2.The author follows the trajectory of both Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn's careers, toward the day they were supposed to meet at Nabokov's apartment in Switzerland. For whatever reason, Solzhenitsyn never showed up.Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner of the Gulag; Nabokov emigrated Russia after the revolution and lost a brother to the German Death camps. Nabokov received a lot of criticism from the Emigre community and many back in the Soviet Union because he did not foreground the Soviet tyranny in his novels as Solzhenitsyn had done. Nabokov claimed he did not make public comments about the Soviets or contact people inside the SU to protect these people he knew.

The relationship between Edmund Wilson and Nabokov is also highlighted, especially their arguments over Soviet issues and history.

The most fascinating part of the book for me was the discussion of "Zembla" from "Pale Fire." This
is a real Island in Arctic Russia which was the northernmost part of the Soviet Gulag system.

I certainly expect to reread some of Nabokov's Russian novels with the Russian and German themes in mind.

I'd give this one 5 stars.

[Murat Sahin Ocal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yalnızca Nabokov'un hayatına ilişkin saklı kalanları değil, yirminci yüz yılın ilk yarısının üzeri örtülmüş dile getirilmesi konusunda isteksiz davranılmış gerçeklerine de ışık tutan bir kitap. biyografi meraklısı için başkasının hayatını incitmeden ve yersiz neşter darbeleri ile popüler ilgiye göz kırpmayan çok incelik ve emekle yazılmış. Andrea Pitzer seneler süren bir çalışmayla, ülkeleri gezerek bir kitap yazmış. Çevirmen Yiğit Yavuz güzel Türkçesi ile herkese örnek olacak bir titizlikle çalışmış. Dilin lezzetini eski Türkçeci ya da yeni Türkçeci bağnazlığına iltifat etmeden dili olanca zenginliği ile kullanmış. Dipnotları yazarın dilimize çevrilmiş kitaplarındaki nüshalarının sayfa numaraları ile yeniden kontrol ederek yazdığına kuşkum yok. Bu son derece yorucu ve sıkıcı bir mesai olsa gerek. Diğer yandan, çevirmenin açıklayıcı notlara verdiği emek kitabın değerini daha da artırmış.

Ancak üzücü olan şu ki kitabın editörü yok. Eski Nabokov kitaplarında dizi editörü Fatih Özgüven idi. Şimdi ise dizinin bir ilmeği olmamakla birlikte orta yerinde bir inci tanesi kıymetinde bir kitabın kaderi çevirmen ile düzeltmenin arasındaki ilişkiye emanet edilmiş. Çevirmenin daha önceki işlerini ve bu kitaptaki performansını beğenerek ve imrenerek takip ettiğim için İletişim Yayınları'nın sezon başına kitabı yetiştirme telaşı ile düzeltme işlerine gereken özeni göstermediğini düşünüyorum. İletişim Yayınları belki de tümüyle gençlik edebiyatına dönüp, daha az müşkülpesent okur kitlesi ile yetinse muhtemelen daha isabetli olacak. Çünkü bu tür eserler bir gecelik esinle yazılıp çevrilmiyor. Haklı olarak daha özenli bir yayınevi süreci talep ediyoruz.

Son olarak kitabı okurken aklıma geldi. Neden Türkçe Soljenistin biyografisi yok?

[Rachel Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a fan of all things Vladimir Nabokov, I was pleasantly surprised to find a new biography of his work on the shelf of my local library the other day. I thought I had gone through everything there was to offer there on the great prose master of the 20th century, so I picked it up with glee. The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, provocative title and all, did pique my interest, but I wonder now if it held my attention purely because the subject is my favorite author.

Going into this book it's clear author Andrea Pitzer wants everyone to know of her massive literary breakthrough: VLADIMIR NABOKOV HAD BAD THINGS HAPPEN IN HIS LIFE. OH MY GOD. She starts the book off with what she apparently thinks is a major discovery, that all of Nabokov's books had some elements of the horrors of his own personal life in them. He who lived through the Russian Revolution, World War II and the Cold War must have some secret opinions hiding in his books — right?

And to some degree, yes, Pitzer is right. There are references to anti-Semitism and concentration camps and the Holocaust and wars in his writing, but it's not as though he particularly leans on them for the bulk of his writing. They are interesting backstories, but not vital ones. Anyone who is even a fair weather Nabokov fan would be able to guess that his personal life would play a role in his literature.

I would rate this book higher with the exclusion of two things:

1) The self-aggrandizing idea Pitzer apparently has that no one has ever taken a look at Nabokov's political history before. It's new to me to read specifically into the political history of Nabokov's life, but as I said above, it would be incredibly naive to think there were no influences whatsoever. People who have read Nabokov before recognize these things. But Pitzer — even the title alone tells me she wanted to make a splash in the literary pond but only had a grain of sand to attempt a ripple. (Plus, in her introduction, Pitzer even admits that she only liked Nabokov initially because of his language!) Nabokov was pretty clear in his views on literary analysis, and hunting for things that aren't there, but it seems Pitzer completely ignored that and tried to hunt down anything that would make her thesis even stronger, even when it was selective to begin with. Which leads me to my next point...

2) The comparison of Nabokov to Alexander Solzhenitzyn: Before I was one-third into this book, I was thinking to myself, "Okay, how exactly is Solzhenitsyn relevant here? I hope he meets Nabokov soon." Yet Pitzer spent the entire time talking about the latter and hardly any time talkign about the former, unless it was to make a paltry comparison about how the two Russian authors dealt with their political views and their dedication to their homeland. Their personal lives had literally nothing in common with each other, considering that Nabokov was long gone from Russia before Solzhenitsyn became culturally relevant. And to assume that because Nabokov was merely born in Russia he had a duty to defend it is incredibly stupid, whether that was Solzhenitsyn's genuine belief or one Pitzer merely wanted to project. Then, in the end, when neither author ever meets each other, I felt completely let down; there was an element of something resembling betrayal how Pitzer built up an admittedly weak semblance of their meeting, but a small hope of it nonetheless. (Another Goodreads reviewer recently summed it up well: Pitzer's comparison of the two authors is like a high school student desperately trying to compare and contrast two points that have nothing to do with each other.)

Plus, a smaller criticism, but still an important one: If you're going to write a biography of Vladimir Nabokov, I think it would be prudent to have at least some of the literary and language skills he had. Pitzer seems to want to show off her own literary finesse, even trying to name-drop and emulate Brian Boyd and Stacy Schiff, but she falls short. The writing is interesting for the subject matter alone, but not because she makes it particularly engaging.

I don't want to completely dismiss this book as being completely worthless and a waste of my time. It's an interesting peek into Nabokov's life where not that many people have gone — again, for obvious reasons — and Pitzer clearly did her research in writing a general biography of Nabokov before getting out the scalpel to do more damage. But it's likely that the people interested in this biography to begin with are already Nabokov fans, have already read his books, letters and correspondence and have already learned from earlier biographers what Nabokov felt and thought throughout his literary life. Nothing in this book is new; it might be interesting, but that doesn't merit a completely ridiculous perspective

[Brent Legault · Rating 3 out of 5]

The lasering of her thesis* quickly grows wearisome. And I think Nabokov would look dourly upon the many, many stock phrases and phoned-in language used throughout the book (I know I did -- my lips are pursing even now). But she did bring some insight into his, er, oeuvre; especially the close, very close (and, I believe, mostly accurate) reading of Pale Fire.

*The problem I have with her thesis, besides her strangling the reader with it, is that it's a loveless, joyless way of reading Nabokov's joycrammed and lovestuffed novels (except she overlooks The Eye for some reason). I mean, let's say her thesis is on target and that all or most of his books were unearthing injustices and allowing sunlight to attack and kill the mildew of the industrial evils committed by The Soviet Union and Germany. That he was not an artist, or not solely an artist, but also a crusader, a secret adenda man (all of the things he explicitly decried througout most of his lifetime). So now, rather than take pleasure from his prose, from the art he worked so hard to create for me (and others), I must (if I am to believe in The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov) seek out lines that validate this thesis, see only those and ignore what's really there, like the great intellects who scour the Old Testament looking for clues to some bonus screen of enlightenment.

I would rather not.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knowing a sketch of Vladimir Nabokov's life (a noble who fled the Russian Revolution to Germany with his Jewish wife only to need to flee again), I wondered where "Lolita" came from.... and still do. Although I didn't get my answer, first time author Andrea Pitzer delivered an interesting read.

Most interesting, for me, was not the subject but the related parts. The life of Nabokov's father, the extent of internment and labor camps (from WWI and beyond) from Northern Canada to the British Isles and throughout continental Europe, Vera Nabokov's sister Sonia Slonin's companion, Carl Junghans, and almost anything about Alexander Solzehenitsyn (especially his pre-publication life) were pages that turned themselves.

That the parts on Nabokov were less interesting may be the fault of the subject and not this biographer. Having lived through the tumult of the Revolution, knowing the passion of his father and seeing the suffering of so many, Nabokov had very strong political opinions about which he did very little. While Pitzer doesn't speculate on anything personal about him, he seems to be ignoring his past by writing apolitical novels, romantic poetry and catching butterflies.

Pitzer does find glimpses of politics and history in his work. Lolita's tormentor could be Jewish and there is a hint that he is a survivor of the camps. While this adds a new twist, it doesn't essentially change the story. There is a long discussion of Nova Zemblan, a notorious Russian prison, which has a mention in "Pale Fire". Similarly, other references from Nabokov's writing are mentioned as relating to anti-Semitism and practices of totalitarian states.

A few items are not explained, some large, some small. It would have been good to have more on Nabokov's opinion his work, particularly his most famous work and Hollywood's version of it. Nabokov repeats the motif of doubles, is here a reason for this? Nabokov's mother left Germany for Prague, where she could get a pension. Where does such a pension come from? On p. 206 Vera's sister Lena is referred to as a "Princess".

I'm not sure what had been previously secret. If it is that his work has hidden messages, the case as presented is weak. What may be "new" more than "secret" it is the material on the whereabouts of friends and relatives from his tumultuous youth.

[Tubi(Sera McFly) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nabokov biyografisini elime aldığımda, Nazi Almanyasından çok önce Avrupa'da ve Rusya'da yaygın olan toplama kamplarını, verem mikrobu enjekte edilen Yahudi çocukları, 2.Dünya Savaşı sırasında ABD, İngiltere ve diğer ülkelerin kabul etmediği Yahudi sığınmacıları ve diğer tüm 20.yüzyıl utançlarını bu kadar ayrıntılı okumayı beklemiyordum. Tarihsel gerçekleri Nabokov'un yaşamıyla iç içe okumak isteyenlerin ilk başvuracakları kitap bu olmalı. Buna rağmen, Nabokov'un eserlerinde satır aralarında bu tarihsel gerçeklerin aranması ve Nabokov'un aslında kimi gerçeklere sanıldığından daha duyarlı olduğunu gösterme çabasını biraz iğneyle kuyu kazmak olarak gördüm. Soljenitsin'in yaşamına da yer veren kitapta Nabokov'la Soljenitsin arasında paralellik aranması kitabın en gereksiz bölümlerini oluşturuyor. Onun dışında, iyi ki okumuşum dediğim kitaplardan oldu Vladimir Nabokov'un Gizli Tarihi. Bu tür biyografiler için çevirinin iyi ve akıcı olmasının hayatiliğine de güzel bir örnek oluşturuyor. Vladimir Nabokov'u Sergey Nabokov konusunda affedebileceğimi ise sanmıyorum.

[Patrick Kendall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Skillfully weaving the strands of biography, history, and a closer reading of the political environment of his novels, TSHVN invites a deeper investigation in to Nabokov's seeming cruelty towards his characters. By exposing the horrors of war, concentration camps, and anti-Semitism that chased him across Russia, Berlin, Paris, and finally America, his books can seem to chronicle how violence begets violence and the tragic toll this takes on humanity. New details provide additional threads to unlock references across many of his novels, most interestingly Pale Fire and Lolita, but it is the personal tragedy of Nabokov that is most haunting by the end. The rifts in his family, the criticism by his peers, a tumultuous end of his friendship with Edmund Wilson, and the deft use of a meeting with Solzhenitsyn leaves a lingering sense that it isn't just his characters that are broken in the end.

[Ludmilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Soljenitsin başlangıcını ve Nabokov'u Soljenitsin'e iliştirme çabalarını başarısız buldum. Bu iğneyle kuyu kazma çabası yerine Nabokov'un eserleri hakkında daha fazla bilgi verilebilirdi. Amaçlanan Nabokov'u daha insani yanlarını göstermek gibi görünüyor. Yazar olarak başarılı bulduğum ancak okuduklarımdan pek sevilesi bulmadığım, her daim soğuk ve küçümseyici görünen Nabokov'a birazcık ısındığımı söyleyebilirim. Ama kitap boyunca Nabokov'un romanlarındaki her yahudi atıfı irdelendiğinde şunu düşünmeden edemedim: Vera yahudi olmasaydı, Nabokov yahudi karşıtlığına bu kadar katı olur muydu? Kardeşi hakkında düşündüklerini de göz önüne aldığımda cevabım hayır oluyor. Birkaç şey daha söyleyebilirim bu konu hakkında, ama Borges gibi yazarın siyasi görüşlerinin ya da sevilmeyesi yanlarının aldığım edebi zevki pek de etkilemediğini söyleyerek bitireceğim.

Not: Çeviri çok iyi olmuş, eline sağlık Yiğit Yavuz!

[Omar Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

This examination of Nabokov's life and some of the subtle ways in which the tragedies of the first half of the 20th century influenced his work and show up in his novels is interesting, and worth reading for Nabokov fans. But I found the way she tries to include Solzhenitsyn into this book as some sort of parallel story to be rather forced. Framing the whole book around a meeting between the two writers (which never actually takes place) is strange and sort of pointless. The title and this framing both feel like "clickbait" and all the facts and insights in this book could have been presented in a more straightforward way.
That said, the stories of the Nabokovs and of Solzhenitsyn are both worth reading. From Vladimir Nabokov's classically liberal father (a reform-minded aristocrat who at one time led the Kadet party, became a minister in the White Russians enclave of Crimea, and was later killed in exile while defending one of his political rivals from a pair of assassins), to his mistreated and occasionally bullied gay brother (who died in a concentration camp in 1945), to Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn (from Red army captain to leading dissident and ultimately Russian Nationalist) themselves, this is a fascinating cast of characters. Worth a read, but a bit forced at times.

[Oren · Rating 5 out of 5]

my first review..

This book was set aside by librarians at Chicago’s Harold Washington Library on the Fiction floor, where they always put aside five or six non-fiction books for fiction readers to pick up. Every time I had walked past this book I would pick it up, read it for a few minutes, but leave it. I finally took it home and loved it.

Due to the nature of the man and his life, the book is unable to provide a huge amount of details on specific periods of his life, especially going farther back in his life. But the book is still fascinating. It provides a still relatively large amount of fascinating details about his life, the lives of his also-talented family members, and how bits of each turn up in his works. We learn that while VN is traveling around Europe drumming up money for either an affair or his family’s wife and infant son’s escape from Germany, a brother-in-law who happens to be a preacher (VN’s wife, Vera, was proudly Jewish) visits Vera, who details the family’s desire to escape Germany. The brother-in-law suggests that maybe they should stay and suffer. Meanwhile, word of the affair filters back to Vera, who confronts VN.

Upon reading the book it is difficult to decide if VN has lived a charmed life. He certainly has been very fortunate, if only to escape with his life intact time and time again. But he is constantly misunderstood and underappreciated, and the book provides much commentary on his long-running friendship w/writer and kingmaker, Edmund Wilson, whose wife actually emerges as the more interesting of the two. She may also have been the more intuitive thinker.

Likewise, the book contains a chapter on VN’s relationship with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, although they manage never to meet in person. However, the story of how they almost do is fascinating, as are other nuggets regarding Solzhitsyn’s life, including another interesting almost-meeting that took place. I had read A day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (I’m sure I’m mauling that title) in one day, picking it up from a book shelf in my mother’s house having no idea it was a nobel prize winner. I liked the book, but was naïve enough to be totally oblivious to its political implications, not knowing the book’s history, which is also discussed in this book.

The two big events in the book are, of course, Lolita, and the underlying theme of VN’s pet cause, his fight against tyranny and anti-semitism. VN even visited Israel and protested her enemies in the Six Day War. I can't even begin to imagine the seemingly introverted VN surrounded by loud Israelis, never too shy to express opinions. And his writing is so cryptic. This, readers already knew, but this book lets us know that the codes are exponentially more complex.

Both make fascinating reads, and make the reader want to re-read the VN books already read, and go out and read the VN books not yet read. The author’s analysis is clearly the result of diligent research and very close reading of his works, which is very much to her credit. She also displays a sense of humor you don’t often get with nonfiction works, citing the consternation caused to the Cincinnati library system by the resignation of a particular member in protest of its censorship of Lolita. The sentence is almost Nabokovian.

Lolita…the first chapter entitled Lolita (chapter ten) actually barely mentions the book until its last pages. But the way the book made its way into America (and later Russia) is great, and VN had much anxiety over whether the book would lead to big problems in his life. Thanks to a controversial Graham Greene review, VN returns to a life of wealth, but continues to dream of family long lost. You can even see it in all the pictures. The man never smiled, except in the one picture in which he returns to Paris a literary hero.

This book would make a great gift to someone along with a copy of Lolita to be read together.

"Let us bless the freak." - the man who never smiled and hated hippies.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the end, this was a much better book than I thought it would be when I started out. The publisher's hype about it was a bit too strong and sensational. No, the author does not write prose to match Nabokov's, and no , her new insights are not totally earth shaking.

That said, it's a pretty fascinating look at how Nabokov worked into his novels a reaction against the horrors of the first half of the 20th century, from the Russian revolution to concentration camps, to the Nazi holocaust. And he did it in some very surprising and strong ways. She finds and explores them, and follows the leads even where they are pretty buried.

The book hinges around Nabokov's biography: the assassination of his father not long after the revolution, the deaths of many relatives (including his brother, whose homosexuality bothered Vladimir quite a bit), and the repeated necessity of him and his wife to escape various countries during the rise of the Nazis. She finds political references, maybe surprisingly, in many of his works, and her discussion of them in Pnin, Lolita, and Pale Fire are especially well-done.

I need to go back to these novels; it's been many years since I've read them. While Pitzer is no Bryan Boyd, she's an able writer, and for literateurs interested in one of the finest writers of the 20th century, this is, surprisingly, a must read.

[False · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pitzer made a genuine effort to track a very elusive, flitty man and his equally shrouded literature. Nabokov was a big believer in the reader finding him within his art, but he loved to entrench deeply, and how much time does the average reader have to engage in that without it becoming something obsessional--and there are those people out there. I did gain a greater understanding of how Nabokov wove his personal past in terms of the upheaval of wars and immigration into his books...his concerns over his lack of involvement in the war(s), his own family's sufferings, anti-Semitism (his wife was Jewish), etc. I thought about going back to read more about Nabokov (and I have read plenty) but I decided...time to move on to someone-something else. I'll leave him to the ages.

[World Literature Today]

"The Secret Life of Vladimir Nabokov is a tremendous book, but perhaps the best thing I can say about it is that Pitzer inspires us to return to Nabokov, to go back and re-read his entire oeuvre with a new, now unsentimental eye." - Andrew Martino, Southern New Hampshire University

This book was reviewed in the September 2013 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://bit.ly/17BPNgz

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was well written and very interesting. Although I've lived through the 2nd half of the 20th century there were many aspects of that history I was so oblivious to. I am certain that Nabokov was a great writer but I'm not certain that I want to read any of his books. I'm Very glad I read this book though.

[Joan Zylkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

a good place to start if you know nothing about the author of Lolita, and also an overview of Russian society before and after the Tsars.

[Lucas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vladimir Nabokov foi o autor de ficção que mais li na vida. Eu nunca soube precisar a origem desse fascínio. A suposição óbvia é que todo leitor aficionado por Nabokov compartilha com o autor o que o próprio chamou de mordus i passio aurelianus (sua mania de dicionários). Seríamos, assim, todos unidos pelo prazer de ler descrições de fatos da vida aparentemente ordinários, mas que se enchem de beleza com o aparato verbal construído pelo autor. Particularmente memorável para mim é essa apresentação da personagem Liza, em Pnin:

There are some beloved women whose eyes, by a chance blend of brilliancy and shape, affect us not directly, not at the moment of shy perception, but in a delayed and cumulative burst of light when the heartless person is absent, and the magic agony abides, and its lenses and lamps are installed in the dark. Whatever eyes Liza Pnin, now Wind, had, they seemed to reveal their essence, their precious-stone water, only when you evoked them in thought, and then a blank, blind, moist aquamarine blaze shivered and stared as if a spatter of sun and sea had got between your own eyelids. Actually her eyes were of a light transparent blue with contrasting black lashes and bright pink canthus, and they slightly stretched up templeward, where a set of feline little lines fanned out from each. She had a sweep of dark brown hair above a lustrous forehead, and a snowand-rose complexion, and she used a very light red lipstick, and save for a certain thickness of ankle and rist, there was hardly a flaw to her fullblown, animated, elemental, not particularly well-groomed beauty

Mas hoje não creio que meu fascínio tenha como única explicação a incrível verve do autor. Há mais razões. Não as conheço todas. Talvez o fato de os personagens de Nabokov serem individualistas com paixões terrenas não moderadas. Como lembra Nina Khrushcheva, essa característica coloca Nabokov contra toda a tradição da literatura russa oitocentista; em vez de um senso de comunidade, há o indivíduo; em vez do valor espiritual do sofrimento, há perseguição de prazeres que não reconhecem limitação nem nas convenções sociais.

Outra possível razão do meu fascínio é que, provido de razão ou não, tive sempre a sensação de ser um estrangeiro na própria terra (me ocorre agora o fabuloso título do livro de John Manuel Monteiro sobre escravização indígena no Brasil "Negros da terra", o corolário: negro nenhum é dessa terra). E todos os personagens de Nabokov são emigrées.

Por fim, nos personagens de Nabokov existe a invejável combinação de erudição e auto-confiança. Se se imagina, como quer Beauvoir, que masculinidade é essencialmente performática, ver essas duas dimensões da personalidade como contraditórias - como fui criado para acreditar - impõe homens too fond to books uma maldita escolha de sofia. Mas não há essa contradição em Humbert Humbert que tem, a um só tempo, capacidade de apreciar arte, mas é avesso a qualquer forma de excesso de sensibilidade e a erudição é complementar à sua sexualidade, não seu inverso.

***

Seja qual for minhas razões, o fato é que há muito tempo gostaria de ler uma biografia de Nabokov para saber das origens desse personagem. Minha primeira tentativa foi com a obra em dois volumes de Brian Boyd. Apesar de ser a fonte mais rica para qualquer pessoa interessada na vida de Nabokov, o livro de Boyd não me ajudou no que eu buscava. Em vez de narrar a vida de Nabokov, Boyd cita em quase todos os parágrafos uma obra do autor. O livro acaba ficando muito denso e cansativo de ler.

Depois de mais uma procura encontrei esse livro da Pitzer. O livro tem um ponto positivo (um relato mais histórico e meno literário da vida de Nabokov) e um ponto negativo (a tese que fundamenta o livro). Falo mais sobre esse segundo ponto abaixo.

A tese do livro é absurda. A autora afirma que Nabokov era muito preocupado com política, mas expressava suas visões de forma escondida nos seus romances. É uma tese, ao meu ver, completamente descabida e vai contra tudo que o autor sempre defendeu na vida. Nabokov detestava uso político de arte, era uma pessoa singularmente apática a assuntos do poder. Certamente incomoda muita gente o fato dele estar apenas atrás de mulheres quando os Bolcheviques tomaram o poder na Rússia, ou que, já na Alemanha, ele estava traindo sua mulher judia quando Hitler inaugurava os primeiros campos de concentração.

O esforço da autora nesse livro é de humanizar Nabokov. Algo como "ele não era sociopata que não se preocupava com política nem diante dos maiores eventos históricos do século XX". Talvez ele fosse sim! E não pára aí. Nabokov era terrivelmente homofóbico, suas personagens femininas dão indícios de certa misoginia. Outros autores, inspirados pelo esforço de Pitzer, podem agora tentar reinterpretar sua homofobia ou misoginia? É patético

Enfim, é um bom relato histórico entre os disponíveis, mas a interpretação beira a loucura

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a lot more here on Solzhenitsyn, which is surprising, considering that from at least the title alone you'd think this is more of a critical/biographical assessment of Nabokov's works and life. And it is, but there are many semi-digressions into some of the more arcane and harrowing aspects of the nightmare that was Soviet political life.

You might go for this book as a Nabokov fan, which is why I picked it up, and you might expect something more oriented in one direction: "secret" history meaning, maybe, salacious details from te private life? Close reading of his many novels and stories to reveal hidden meanings? Psychological assessment?

Well, yeah, there's some of each of that. I particularly enjoyed the detailed analysis of his relationship with Edmund Wilson, one of my heroes, which spanned decades and was at times deeply fruitful and deeply frustrating. One of their major falling-outs, interestingly, was over politics. Wilson, I'm sad to say, seemed to be on his high-horse much of time and insensitively obtuse about Nabokov's dismissive (to put it mildly) attitude toward the value of the Russian Revolution and even WW2. But for a time, they were literary soulmates.

Speaking of politics, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to read this. Nabokov resolutely rejected any overt ideological approach to reading any of his fiction, and had even less time for psychological interpretations. Which is pretty consistent with his art-for-art's- sake approach to writing, and fair play to him for having his own style. I don't always necessarily buy the idea that artist's don't understand their muse, or can explain their creative process or goals. All that "trust the tale, not the teller" stuff.

The muse moves in mysterious ways, certainly, but it's alright- I think many writers seem to have a pretty decent grasp of what drives them to write, what they are getting at, etc. It's just that it's hard to define, especially for the artists themselves. But who better to try and say the unsayable, but a writer, for pete's sake? So Nabokov's protest about being taken too tendentiously is well-taken.

But. It's impossible to overlook the fact that Nabokov was uniquely situated to see quite a bit of the political turmoil of the 20th Century straight in his face, in three different countries, and with great personal and professional risk, at that. He protests too much. And the novels are full of politicized intrigue, of course. But Pitzer doesn't get that far into any of it, but sort of summarizes the political elements of Nabokov's work, and then only really some of it, while she simultaneously tells the story of his extended family and Nabokov's own biography AND Russia's turbulence AND Solzhenitsyn's life and writing in relation to it.

There's plenty of interesting material here, and we get a smattering of it, but not enough to delve in too deeply. And as interesting and courageous as Solzhenitsyn was, the fact that he was SO CLOSE to sitting down and dining with the Nabokovs in their gilded exile in Switzerland and didn't even end up arriving for the dinner, he steals much more of the show in this book than he needed to.

[Levent Mollamustafaoglu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned about this book from a fellow translator who has published the Turkish translation of Pale Fire (no small feat!) and is currently translating this. I wanted to read it as quickly as possible for the Nabokov adaptation I'm currently doing for a play.

The book is a much enlarged version of an academic study Andrea Pitzer did and she seems to have done several years off research which has been enabled by a Harvard grant. The quality of the research is apparent from the richness of the notes at the end (which take up almost one third of the Kindle version I read).

The premise is simple: Nabokov is a controversial author, mainly due to his portrayal of a pedophile in Lolita and the perception that he is performing art for the sake of art and is not really interested in whatever is happening in the outside world. He himself has also reinforced this view - could be by design, of course. Here is what he says in the Introduction to Bend Sinister: " Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of 'thaw' in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent". Pitzer's hypothesis is that this is a big façade. Nabokov is indeed wrapping his observations of the real world in his books, but he is doing it in the least obvious way. It is when you read his whole oeuvre that a common theme in the background arises: Although Nabokov keeps repeating that he is not interested in politics, he is indeed putting cleverly hidden references to the Nazi and Soviet regimes' atrocities in the form of concentration camps (like Dachau for Nazis or the Gulag for the Soviets) and he has especially tried to immortalise through art, the suffering of the Jews. Although he himself is not a Jew, his wife Vera is and he has always reacted to anti-Semitism since his early ages.

This hypothesis brings a completely different interpretation of his works, especially the one that has been the subject of many controversies, namely Lolita. Pitzer shows a lot of thickly veiled references in Lolita to the struggling of his fellow Russian émigrés and the Jews. It is his highly intelligent mind and a different artistic sense that has caused him to use words to point out these references to the careful and methodical reader instead of using a direct method such as the one Alexander Solzenythsin has used in his Gulag Archipelago or earlier novels.

The book has been invaluable to me for my own purpose, but I think it is in general interesting for the general reader, due to the episodic structure, describing the unfolding events in Europe and the U.S. in a long period in the 20eth Century. Pitzer is covering most of the books (except Transparent Things, which is one of Nabokov's last books and among one of my favourites).

I am sure this new vision brought to one of the greatest writers of the 20eth Century will also trigger new academic work on his life and creations. I could actually see a movie possibility, given the rich information and appeal of the subject. Highly recommended.

[Susan from MD · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book traced Nabokov's life from birth to death - and actually before and after, with information about his parents, siblings and son. The author posits that Nabokov put into his novels many of the most significant events that occurred during his lifetime. His characters either practice or experience anti-Semitism, abuse, imprisonment of one form or another, and so on. The author goes through each of his books and ties aspects of the book to real and often specific events from real life. Although in reading Nabokov's books, I saw many of these references, I'm not sure that I agree that they are so closely drawn from his life versus the broader experiences of life that he lived through.

I fully believe that Nabokov drew on the experiences of his life. How he delicately weaves history with nuanced characterizations is part of what makes him brilliant, IMO. Pitzer gives a literal, "matchy" approach to showing the parallels between Nabokov's life and his novels, which seem not only overstated, but also limiting. On one hand, it is brilliant if he inserted real events obliquely into the narrative. On the other hand, it loses some of the magic if it is "copied" from real events rather than synthesizing something new that is inspired by history and his (and his family's or friends') experiences. His stories are so inventive that I think the latter would hold for me - I would be a little disappointed if his work was so tied to real life - not sure whether that makes sense. I give the book 4/5 because, although I didn't completely buy Pitzer's argument, I'm again impressed by Nabokov's ability to be subtle.

[Kerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely readable and well-written, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov delves into Nabokov's hidden politics and human rights causes, buried so deep within his texts that they sometimes require literary sleuthing to uncover. The book builds evidence slowly, putting Nabokov's life in context with history and contrasting his work with that of Solzhenitsyn, who appears through this book as a minor character.

Pitzer gets off to a slow start, but the pace matches Nabokov's development of literary sophistication. It might be easy to dismiss the book as unfocused or failing in its intent if the book is not given a fair chance. However, as with Nabokov's life, the climax of this book is Lolita, and then the ball gets rolling. Nabokov famously reworked many of his central themes, and Pitzer illuminates how the writer took a cumulative approach with his work, re-using ideas that he gave insufficient treatment to in the past to more adequately capture his intent in later, more mature work.

The central argument to the book is that the "apolitical" Nabokov was intensely sensitive to particular issues and, with sleight-of-hand and other deceptive techniques, slipped commentary about them into his work, leaving a trail of clues that evidence an attentiveness to the plight of the exile, the problem of antisemitism, the horror of concentration camps, and other issues.

Pitzer persuasively asserted her ideas, and her research was clearly lovingly and meticulously conducted. A beautiful book.

[Pip · Rating 4 out of 5]

I truly enjoyed this book, though it was not quite what I expected.

The book examines the relative position of Nabokov on the scale of political versus art for art's sake authorial intent. She tries to expose the tension between various revolution era Russian emigre authors, and then place Nabokov's literary output within this.

According to her, Nabokov was seen as unsupportive of mother Russia by most of his contemporaries. Her central thesis is that this view is not fair. She focuses on Nabokov's geographic and cultural relation to the political forces of first half of the 20th century. The book is a fascinating read and I enjoyed it thoroughly, but I will say that, while she does provide fairly indisputable evidence that Nabokov was politically aware and did include this awareness in his fiction, I am not convinced that this was a primary intent in his writing.

Having said that, I am very grateful for her hard work and great writing. It was a fast, absorbing read and I would recommend it for anyone interested in Nabokov.

[David Winn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good literary biography. Pitzer is more interesting when she focuses on the texts and historical contexts for them rather than the elements of Nabokov's life that seem to have mild influence or inconclusive relations.

To follow the somewhat sensational title, she employs several sentences that attempt to build suspense and has a penchant for rhetorical questions. These habits become tiresome at points.

There is some very well done reading and analysis, though. The persistent themes of Jewishness and the recurring idea of the wandering Jew throughout his oeuvre are difficult threads to trace and require very careful reading. Humbert Humbert's Jewish identity is a particularly interesting idea, especially given the extreme obscurantism of Nabokov's allusions to it.

The two best chapters are, by no coincidence, specifically dedicated to Lolita and Pale fire--his two greatest works. They are the peeling back of several fine gauzy layers to find the stories within stories that are created through the absence of detail, or particularly vague reference.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fascinating life Nabokov lived. His family managed to escape the Bolsheviks, the Nazis (twice), and it took years for him to get the recognition he deserved. Sadly, many will continue to overlook his genius because they have a narrow-minded view of his most controversial work, Lolita. This is a great biography that also includes many details of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's role in 20th century Russian literature.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well researched. Offers some new and intriguing insights to Nabokov's most famous novels; describes how the horrors of the First World War influenced Nabokov's pre-WWII novels, and how the thread of totalitarianism and the evils of concentration camps can be traced through a huge portion of his fiction.

[AskNezka · Rating 4 out of 5]

author interview: http://www.theworld.org/2013/04/nabok...

[Misha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think it is time to dive into the Nabokov writings

[Vikas Datta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite a detailed and penetrating analysis of this most singular novelist's craft and thought...