The Hidden Nabokov

Abstract: Not simple autobiography or mere camouflage, the relationship of Nabokov's fiction to his life shows his conscious process of misdirection. We can identify some autobiographical material that Nabokov hid, and why. Jane Grayson concluded that "in his later production Nabokov's personal experience appears in a less recognizable form. There it is digested, sometimes even parodied." She finds increasing self-consciousness, irony and detachment, and "a developing preoccupation with pattern and artifice" in the later work. The Gift, Invitation to a Beheading, Speak, Memory and Pale Fire conceal some of Nabokov's off-stage concerns—physical distress, terror of possible imprisonment and death, grief at abandoning Russia forever, fear that if he were to lose his Russian literary tradition and his literary identity, it would be tantamount to death—as well as the distressing might-have-beens found in Pnin . Nabokov's 1945 poem, "An Evening of Russian Poetry," is emblematic of the way he conceals the pain of emigration in his novels: the poem's narrator is stylized, arch, comical, composed, but his agony slips through the surface of his presentation to American undergraduates in untranslated Russian, hidden from his anglophone audience.