The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov Kindle Edition

We are given a new interpretation of Nabokov's life and work. The main hypothesis is that the man was a much more political writer than is generally realized. Though Nabokov had opinions, they didn't seem to enter his fictional writings much. This is arguably a misunderstanding.
Nabokov was always unabashed about his anti -Communism, which, after all, had a solid personal basis in his life experience. While in the US, he would be more conservative than liberal. Later, when already living in Switzerland, he applauded LBJ's civil rights legislation. Unfortunately also his Vietnam policy.
Normally he abstained from political partisanship, and he postulated a kind of 'art for art's sake' theory of literature. The man was not a joiner.
Solshenitsyn was also not a joiner, but otherwise the direct opposite ... Art in the service of man. This book tells us that the gap between the two men was smaller than we thought.

Apart from interpretations, the book has interesting gossip. Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn really did try to meet in Montreux, not long before N died.
Ayn Rand, when still called Alisa Rosenbaum, was friends with N's little sister in St. Petersburg, when paradise was still real.
Another story that was new to me was the relationship between Vera's sister Sonia and versatile propagandist Carl Junghans, who was a former Communist and a former Nazi, with a record of cooperation with Riefenstahl on the 36 Olympics movies. That man must have been an ideal inspiration for one or the other of N's villains. This book sees him as a part of Humbert Humbert's ancestry.

With reference to Lolita, Pitzer tells us the rather shocking story that the name Camp Q, where Lolita spends her summer before her abduction, was in real life the name of a Canadian camp for suspect aliens during WW2, and that German POWs would be interned there together with Jewish refugees, even with survivors from concentration camps. Shocking.
One aspect of Lolita, that Pitzer elaborates on, is the frequent presence of 'daily' antisemitism in this novel. I had noticed those things, but had not assembled them to a pattern in my reception. N was sensitive to these things, and Vera was quite fierce.
Pitzer tells us to read Humbert Humbert as an escapee from the holocaust, a new version of the Wandering Jew. Similarly, we are shown Kinbote, the madman in Pale Fire, as a refugee from the GULAG, with the real name Botkin.

Pitzer has a command of language which is up to the task of writing about this master of style. The book uses Brian Boyd's two volume biography extensively. That makes me wonder if the new book was necessary at all. Is it more than a shorter version of Boyd, does it add? Yes, Pitzer introduces more Russian, German, French, American, world history into the biography, all with reference to N's work and life.

Is the book's title about the secret history justified? Unfortunately: no. The alleged discovery of secrets fails. I should deduct a star in punishment, but I felt generous.
Any attentive reader of N's work must have been fully aware of the many political facts and opinions and statements in most of N's work. There is no secret, and certainly not in his life as shown here. Interpretations of the novels are just that, interpretations. No secrets here.
N's most frequent fictional subjects were exile and tyranny. Even the seemingly unpolitical stories are rooted in time and place. It is hard to overlook his politics, despite his protestations that politics have no role in art. Even where the surface themes seem unpolitical, things are happening in the background.

Despite being a relative old guy, I didn't begin reading Nabokov until around the time of his death, when I was in my late teens. As a result, I was reading his work after (in most cases long after) it was written. And, apparently like many/most VN readers, I never really thought about putting it into an historical context. I read him, as it were, out of time. I became familiar with the basics of his biography (and later, thanks to Brian Boyd, VERY familiar with his biography), but I never really looked upon his writing as being "about" or, exactly, "of" his times. Certainly there were bits and pieces that I could connect, and his returning to themes of tyranny and prisons were clear enough, but I never really thought about his work as charting and commenting directly upon history, or his story, per se.

I read this, then, with great interest and am very pleased to have it in the world. Pitzer does some remarkable research and goes to great pains to uncover people, places and events that turn up, often in obscure and twisted fashion, in Nabokov's work.

Combining literary scholarship, historical narrative and what could pass, in some senses, as investigative journalism, Pitzer reveals just how entwined VN's work is with the life he lived and world he lived it in. A caveat here: this does not treat all of VN's work in depth. the focus is on those of his writings that most fall under the author's focus and as a result, some works get short shrift. This is, of course, as it should be, even though a couple of my personal favorites are barely mentioned. Too bad for me.

A thumbnail review on Amazon is not the place to start larding on detail, and no one needs a synopsis here. I will say only that I learned a great deal here and, perhaps most significantly for a work that is both popular and scholarship, it is prompting me to return to Nabokov's work itself and reread a whole handful of novels in a new light. And, frankly, anything that pokes you to go back into Nabokov is worth a few stars, and anything that sends you back with some new things to think about deserves all five. And it is very well written, to boot.

Nabokov is usually considered an author distanced from the clang and bang of history, dwelling instead in the lofty realm of pure art. Without in the least diminishing Nabokov's art, Andrea Pitzer carefully demonstrates how the dark shadows of history (the Russian Revolution, Leninism and Stalinism, the experience of refugees, anti-Semitism, and more) were cast upon all of his fiction. Thus, we have a fine contextual reading of Nabokov's fiction. But such a reading would be of interest mainly to those dwelling in the academic house of Nabokov studies. Thankfully, with zest and style, Pitzer offers us a robust biography of a major writer, tracing him from his aristocratic routes, to his wandering and impoverished days in Europe, to his years in the United States, and finally to his luxurious stay in Montreux Palace Hotel. The Nabokov that emerges from this work remains an artist dedicated to his work, often cool to much in life but also aware of the temper of his times. This book solves some of the mysteries of Nabokov's texts and life in a manner that is engaging and insightful.

A fascinating study of how the author (Nabokov) worked his life into his art. Andrea Pitzer seems to have gotten inside Nabokov for real. However, I was disappointed not to be able to communicate with her directly, either through her website or through the publisher.