A life with Nabokov

2026-01-26 - 16:02

In 1999, when Princeton University Press published Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a study by University of Auckland scholar Dr Brian Boyd, The Observer described it as “a remarkable, obsessive, delirious, devotional study.” All happy scholars, as Tolstoy might have conjured, are mad in their own way. Boyd absorbed Nabokov so feverishly that his core philosophy smelted and annealed the master’s worldview: “To be observant. Attention to detail. The compulsion to notice.” Our interview in his Mt Eden lair bounded across his long years of Nabokovian study. Wellington, 1974. The young scholar of double-two seals a letter bound for Montreux. Inside: his Master’s thesis on Pale Fire and, tucked in beside, was the solution to a riddle that had nettled the criticulés for nigh two years. Who narrates Transparent Things? None had solved the signs, Nabokov himself lamented in Strong Opinions. But Boyd, gentlemen of the jury, pulled off a grand feat, a neat proof he solved lucidly and wrote to Nabokov in a cool, composed tone, like a novice edging past wimpled mother superior. Weeks evanesced into months. He arrived at the University of Toronto for his doctorate, as sugar maples moulder from rufous to russet, fall leaves choke the brooks and roadside swails, and the last cricket cries in the crisp, wan weeds. The narrator turns out to be not so much a man as a remnant: a netherworldly onlooker, a pale, patient revenant of a certain Mr R., reporting de profundis. And then, Dear Reader, the reply arrives at last: a postcard from Véra Nabokov, “with a few precious pencil corrections from Nabokov.” There, in the master’s own hand and imprimatur, the verdict that would confirm a lifetime’s devotion, earned through sheer nerve and graphite. “Brilliant!” Nabokov had seen Boyd’s intellect, recognising from this antipodean acolyte a kindred obsession with pattern and precision. The vacuum of my soul, Humbert writes, managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty. For Boyd, the bright beauty were the tales of a novelist, high literary art itself. And the vacuum was insatiable. * Dr Boyd flirted with other masters, shopping in the general stores of other periods and authors, considering Dryden (before reaching Toronto), Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Woolf and Beckett, then fixing his dry palm on an American metafictionist, John Barth. Yet the cartwheels of Fortuna had already motioned their quiet gearing over the glossy emporium floors, moving about fishlike, in destiny’s deep, settled sediments and substrata. Christmas, 1969. The high summer of Boyd’s youth. His father’s gift that would thrust our Boyd to the hilt of fickle McFate: Nabokov’s Ada, hardbound, first English edition, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, with the bookshop’s “rubber stamp on the paste-down front endpaper.” In late 1976, he began annotating each page with the fervour of a medieval monk to the Vulgate. That copy sits beside his desk still, wrapped in a bilayer of protective plastic, teeming with scribbles and curlicues: “my most valuable physical possession, since its marginalia provide the raw data for most of the ongoing Ada annotations.” Ada, or Ardor, would soon prove her use. A corvée of filial duty: a reluctant excursion to some maternal acquaintance, a woman he did not especially wish to see. “I didn’t get on particularly well with my mother,” he disclosed, “and I didn’t particularly want to see a friend of hers, but I felt pressured into doing so.” There, on the friend’s painted wall, a photograph of a hydrofoil called Bras d’Or. Boyd recalled that the first page of Ada mentions the heroine’s ancestor, a Governor of Bras d’Or. A tidal lake in Nova Scotia. Alexander Graham Bell was experimenting with hydrofoils. And all the way through Ada, something strange was happening to electricity: phones powered by hydro rather than hot wire. How queer life is! The coincidence alerted him to how much he had missed. Ada (and that odd little chain of associations beginning with Bras d’Or) yanked his full attention into Nabokov’s orbit for good. It would take another two years before he began to solve Ada’s elusive cyphers. Dr Boyd’s archival index card system for his Nabokov research—a method inherited from the master himself. Nabokov famously composed his novels on index cards, allowing him to shuffle scenes and reorder time. Boyd adopted the same system for tracking thousands of biographical details, cross-references, and chronological patterns across Nabokov’s seven-decade life. In Toronto. The Robarts Library, where our scholar sequestered himself in the Reference Room’s fluorescent whirr and purr, as he scanned and skimmed over Ada’s allusive thickets, he toiled through the days, parsing every glittering shard of Nabokovian arcana, line by lapidary line. And in his pastime (if one can call such monomania), our possessed recited—nay, performed—to his cohabitants (and sometimes solo) in the kitchen of that draughty Edwardian brick house (maison hantée) the 999 lines of John Shade’s Pale Fire and solo, beneath the kitchen’s leadlighted quarrel window, where coloured glass snapped the evening light into chromatic fragments of cinnabar reds, bottle greens, amber golds. He had first intoned them to a captivated audience of familiar and strangers on a long bus ride along the Gulf of Finland, the Baltic ion lights feebly flicker past as he travelled to the Russian summer school of 1982. In both occasions, there he stood or sat, récitant, cantillating Nabokovian verses, in sentience and in dreams. * Boyd’s scholarship ended after his PhD examination in April 1979. His coffers had dried out. McFate, that old trickster, had simply changed the terms of engagement. What remained was purer devotion for its own famished sake. In April 1979, Boyd’s girlfriend (still not Ms Nicholson, pas tout à fait) mentioned she’d chanced upon The Nabokov-Wilson Letters in New York. He made her take him straight there, and there—mon Dieu—saw that the original letters resided in the Beinecke Library at Yale. There, Boyd found letters that had been missed when copies were sent to Simon Karlinsky in San Francisco, and he drew Karlinsky’s attention to them (which used to augment Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya). He knew immediately, with the red sun of decision rising, where he’d be heading next. Nabokov had cultivated an air of Olympian remoteness and had long expressed his disdain for writers who preserved their manuscripts. “It is like passing around samples of one’s sputum,” he declared in Strong Opinions. Along with everybody else, Boyd had assumed there would be no chance of finding the Nabokov papers. But he was wrong. Gloriously, magnificently, providentially wrong. At Yale, he found hundreds of letters from Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, his closest literary friend in the 1940s, and 25 letters omitted from Karlinsky’s book. Electrified by these discoveries, he spent the next two months flitting back and forth among libraries at Wellesley College, Harvard, and Cornell, the Bakhmeteff archive of Russian émigré papers at Columbia, the Library of Congress, and elsewhere. With a monthly Greyhound pass permitting unlimited travel, he turned their buses into inns, their nightly routes into lodgings,rest stops into chambres garnies—riding from library to library during the week. To spare what coin he could, he turned the webbed arterial highways into mobile hostels, where he would ride southward through the sleeping states, digesting the day’s archival findings beneath the flickering bulbs of Emeralite, while the surrounding East Coast slumbered oblivious. Only returning to Toronto (to his girlfriend) on weekends when rare book rooms were closed. At two in the morning, he disembarks, transfers, and rides north again “to arrive back at the library at opening time again, not very fresh or very clean.” Yet young enough—the stamina of youth!—to keep going. I thought, Reader, of Humbert’s peregrinations across motel-pocked America, that same manic energy, that obsessive covering of ground. Dr Boyd lounges in relief, in padded fabric seats and perforated benches across the American Northeast, with merely BK burgers and Quarter Pounders to crowd his bowels with steak and mustard. He dozes off, shutting his eyes weary, on the dark inner side of his eyelids, the little ghost in natural colours, the master’s voice smouldering in conscious half-light: “Brilliant!” * In early 1978, Madame McFate, ses mains capricieuses, had once again set our scholar adrift, this time toward a calling that would vitally indent his life’s work. Boyd had sent two chapters of his doctoral thesis to Carl Proffer, a Nabokov scholar and Russian-language publisher. Proffer raved about them and, later that year, the same person told Boyd that he had sent them to Véra Nabokov, who liked what she saw. Véra, recently widowed, fiercely vigilant over her husband’s legacy, recognised in that dissertation a rare devotion, a precision that spoke of genuine understanding of her late husband’s lifeblood. “After reading it,” Boyd recalled, “she wrote, inviting me to visit her.” Dr Boyd’s annotated copy of Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). The marginalia represent decades of close reading. Visible note references Boyd’s own scholarly observations connecting Ada to the wider Nabokovian opus. Boyd then sent her the complete thesis sometime in early 1979. By July 1979, Boyd had planned to return to the far side of the Earth. Instead, he changed course, flying east, not homeward to Zealand but to the exhaustively lauded Central Alps. He wore “the three-piece suit” his parents had bought him, after years of wearing only brightly coloured overalls, and in it he felt “as comfortable as a giraffe on a surfboard.” Yet Boyd alighted from the train at the Swiss station, his heart pounding with tiger joy. The Montreux Palace Hotel rose before him like the brocaded palaces of the past, its Belle Époque façade awash in the Alpine light. From its balcony, the Nabokovs had looked across the crescent Lake Geneva toward the French Savoy Alps and, to the left, the Swiss Dents du Midi, the gateway to the Valais. And somewhere within those ornate corridors was Véra Nabokov. On their first meeting, Boyd describes her with a kind of clipped awe, as if Véra were ticking off label warnings on vials at a corner drugstore. She was approaching 80, exuding the stiffness of a martinet, while losing her sense of audition. Her hands trembled badly. In her bright days in America, she carried a pistol in her purse. “She told me that she is suspicious by nature.” And suspicious, she had every right to be. Jurors, allow me to introduce the antagonist of this subplot: Andrew Field, an American critic living in Australia, Nabokov’s handpicked biographer who went spectacularly rogue. According to Dr Boyd, “[Véra] had been wary of Field from the first, but became even more appalled than she had feared when she saw what he produced in his 1977 biography.” In 1967, Andrew Field published a critical study of Nabokov that included rudimentary biographical contextualisation. Nabokov, pleased with Field’s enthusiasm, invited him to enlarge a bibliography compiled by Dieter E Zimmer. While that project was in progress, Field proposed a biography in 1968, and Nabokov accepted. In January 1971, Nabokov showed Field letters to his parents and a few to Véra, sometimes with marginal identifications. His first book, Nabokov: His Life in Art, was, as Dr Boyd charitably concedes, “his best book. It has some bizarre and naïve things, but Nabokov [fed him helpful clues that he sometimes made good use of].” “In the archive I found the hundreds of typescript pages of the Nabokovs’ corrections to Field’s biography, a marvellous resource, poorly used by Field himself.” Then the moth holes had nibbled in. Everything after that is the tragedy of mislaid trust: Field’s work was said to have gone downhill, and Nabokov ended up issuing harsh corrective lists. He told Field the “style and tone” were “beyond redemption,” while demanding some targeted deletions. Nabokov had granted Field access to photocopies of his letters to his mother, Elena, but had excised the salutations. In those sanitised greetings, Field counted (and miscounted) space for seven letters and deduced, in complete ignorance of Russian epistolary convention, that Nabokov had called his mother “Lyolya” and that this was the source for “Lolita.” Then, voilà! In fact, Nabokov called his mother “matyushka” or “radost” (meaning “joy” or “dearest”), and to a Russian ear, “Lyo-” and “Lo-” are entirely different sounds. Nonetheless, in 1973, Field wrote to Nabokov that he “could easily wait until Nabokov’s death and then write a book entitled, say, He Called His Mum Lolita.” Nabokov’s lawyers and Field’s battled for three years. When Nabokov: His Life in Part was published in 1977, a few weeks before Nabokov’s death, it remained what one critic called “not only a vast compendium of error but so nauseatingly mannered and self-important as to have a kind of morbid appeal only for those fascinated by literary and scholarly pathology.” Following Nabokov’s death, Véra Nabokov maintained strict control over her husband’s archives. They were not accessible to scholars during this time. After Field, Dr Boyd thought Véra would simply not agree to another biography. Field’s 1973 Nabokovian bibliography contained a glassy shimmer of flaws and fatamorgana. His 1977 biography was riddled with “envious rivalry, wild guesses, and astonishing errors (he misdated the Russian Revolution to 1916).” Nabokov himself had raged in a letter: “I cannot tell you how upset I am... It was not worth living a far from negligible life... only to have a blundering ass reinvent it.” And here, Reader, lies the delicious irony: Field’s faux pas so reliably boosted Boyd’s own confidence. Field’s bibliography was, in Dr Boyd’s assessment, “appallingly flawed, and needed so many corrections and supplementations that before I had started writing the dissertation I realised I knew more about Nabokov’s bibliography than Field ever had.” That is why, on le grand moment with Véra, on that four-day sojourn at the edge of the Vaud Alps, Dr Boyd pumped the widow with questions until way past what he later learned was her usual bedtime. “She couldn’t understand my New Zealand accent,” Dr Boyd said. “She was still recovering from Nabokov’s death.” Véra learned from Dr Boyd’s questions that he knew much more about Nabokov’s bibliography and life than anyone else did. Boyd requested access to the sealed archives. “She could sense my passion... but she was always wary.” Sometime between August and September 1979, some two odd months after that first meeting, she assented, writing to him asking if he would like to catalogue her husband’s archives. “It took me a whole two loud heartbeats to decide to accept the invitation.” Sue Lyon as Dolores Haze in the 1962 version of Lolita, directed by Stanley Kubrick In November 1979, he returned to Montreux and would see Véra daily for six weeks as he sorted through the foxed pages and prints. He spent two Southern summers, or Northern winters, while also working on the materials for his bibliography project. “Véra was anything but forthcoming so far as her own life was involved,” Dr Boyd plained, “but she talked happily about her husband, and I interviewed her several times a week for most of a year.” Yet the wraiths of qualms persisted still through the parapets of Old World formalities. She called him “Mr Boyd” for years. Never “Brian.” Despite the distanced address, he diligently earned Véra’s trust, like sand through an hourglass, or more precisely, like the patient trickle of archival data, from red letter cards to dog-eared decks of codex. La patience comme preuve d’amour. She did not speak to him on first-name terms until after she read the draft of his first chapter, five years after they first met. Sometime in early February 1980, when Boyd was requesting access to Nabokov’s letters to his mother, Véra was trying to deflect Boyd’s insistent prayers to be allowed access. She said to him, “Why do you need to see those, if you’re writing only a bibliography? Of course, if you were writing a biography, I would show you everything.” Boyd gulped but said nothing. He was a young academic with new courses to teach and no time to write a biography. But his heart leapt no less, recognising the gummed hairs of sundews, the hook of the promised reality, some beaming foreglimpse of access to the master’s prized holographs. He applied for a fellowship, and as soon as he was awarded it, he wrote to her, reminding her of her words. * Véra’s wariness may have deeper roots than Field alone. There was the matter of Princess Zinaida Shakhovskaya, whose antisemitic attitude had bedevilled Mrs Nabokov for decades. Shakhovskaya was a Russian Orthodox; her brother was a flannelled Patriarch. She resented Véra’s Jewish background, blaming her for Vladimir’s course-drift from the church of Moscow, with a fervour that bordered on pathological. In 1959, at the Gallimard party in Paris for the launch of the French Lolita, Shakhovskaya snaked through the merry crowd toward Nabokov, “ready to embrace him.” But Nabokov coldly rebuffed her advance with the frosted, distant “Bonjour, madame” of a total stranger. From that precise moment, Shakhovskaya pivoted her resentment toward Véra, blaming her for the snub (even though Véra herself was surprised by it), and Boyd saw this as the start of Shakhovskaya’s long, needling campaign against Véra. In 1973, Shakhovskaya published a short story featuring a writer in Nabokov-like surroundings who feels “a surge of release and freedom” after his wife’s death. The cruelty was unmistakable. Then, in 1979, she published V poiskakh Nabokova (In Search of Nabokov), a memoir-critique whose thesis was nakedly vicious: Nabokov’s talent had withered under “alien (Jewish) influence” until he became a “rootless, alienated, spiritless decadent.” And when Dr Boyd interviewed Shakhovskaya for his biography, she made a confession: “I wrote that book against Véra. And if you say so, I will deny it.” But Shakhovskaya mentioned a name Boyd had never heard before: Irina Guadanini, Nabokov’s Russo-Parisian mistress. She also revealed the name of the person who now possessed Nabokov’s epistles to Irina. Boyd rang his way through the Paris white pages, name after name (it was a common Russian surname), until he found her. He arranged to meet her. She read their letters aloud to Boyd in Russian, refusing to let him read them directly, to which Dr Boyd theorised, “so she could sell it” in toto. * Let us pause here, gentlewomen of the jury, to examine this secondary flame, this blond divorcée with the “strikingly regular features of classical statuary”. It was Boyd who traced the shadow of this 1936 affair; when I asked what details surprised him most in his decades of forensic labour, he pointed to this very moment. It began in sunless conditions in Paris. The assignations were arranged through Irina’s mother, Vera Kokoshkin, who acted as procuress for her own daughter. From which the relationship developed cautiously at first and then intensified over roughly one year (1936–1937). Nabokov was already married to Véra Nabokov (née Slonim), who bore him their only child, Dmitri. The affair ran in parallel to the marriage, entirely covert. Yet the stress of deceiving Véra exacerbated Nabokov’s psoriasis to agonising proportions. The psychosomatic tokens of inner conflict. He wrote of “indescribable torments” that nearly drove him to suicide. The stress of deceiving Véra clawed at his skin like guilt made manifest. He wrote secretly to Irina, telling her that his life with Véra had been fourteen years of “cloudless happiness,” and that now all this now foundered in precarious straits. Véra had received an anonymous letter from Paris, four pages long, in Russian but in Roman script, recounting the affair in detail. He had denied it all but found it agonising to pretend that things were on their former jovial plane. “The inevitable vulgarity of deceit,” he wrote to Irina. “And suddenly your conscience puts its foot down, and you see yourself a scoundrel.” On 7 July 1937, Nabokov unburdened himself to Véra in Cannes. He confessed what Véra had long suspected, that he was engulfed, utterly submerged in a love affair with Irina Guadanini. The confession was total and unsparing. At first, Véra’s response was measured: if he loved the woman, he should go to her in Paris at once—she told Nabokov. But he could not. Boyd records that Nabokov would later call this evening, save for the night of his father’s murder, the direst of his life. August came with the force of gravity, Véra discovered that Vladimir had broken his solemn vow to sever all ties with Irina, instead continuing to write with the ardour of a man ensorceled (four letters in the first ten days alone). The furious electric clouds roiled above the Côte d’Azur. Une tempête! Véra threatened to take Dmitri from his father. The child was the only vulnerability Nabokov could not overcome. But soon came the coup de grâce. In September, Guadanini appeared in Cannes (against Nabokov’s explicit wishes, but with Kokoshkin’s coaxing), agitating those involved. She had followed her lover to confront her rival. The three of them, suspended in the heat of the French Riviera, a drama courting the most torrid feuilleton (en bas-de-page de “La Chronique Mondaine”). When Nabokov descended to the beach with Dmitri for their morning swim, Irina rushed toward him, her heels clacking rapidly on the sun-warmed pavement. Nabokov spotted her. He recoiled in surprise. He simply refused her entreaties, telling her, with that dashed comportment of a man, that whatever he felt, he felt more for his wife. Nabokov asked her to go. But she did not. When he and the child settled on the sand, she positioned herself at a distance, watching the family savour their leisure. It was the last time Nabokov and Irina ever met. * Nabokov chose to stay with his wife because of his affection for their only son, Dmitri. The child received the fullness and vigour of Vladimir’s doting adoration. In Dr Boyd’s account (drawing on Speak, Memory), Dmitri, as a toddler, between ages two and five, is put on an extravagant regimen: no milk “in any form,” and instead the juice of “a dozen fresh oranges per day.” It’s oddly Nabokovian in excess and restraint, signalling that poverty may tighten around the parents, but the child would never feel the pinpricks of privation. Nabokov never learned to drive, but he adored “the poetry of motion” (bicycles, trains, imagined flights), and he turned that fascination outward into fatherhood. Dr Boyd describes Nabokov strolling out with Dmitri for long morning stretches “every day that the sun shone,” watching with wonder the boy’s instinctive attraction toward tram depots, little bridges over railway tracks, parked trucks, the whole city-throb of garages and machines. Friends buy the boy, on his second birthday, a four-foot-long silver-painted Mercedes pedal car, a racing model, which Dr Boyd points to as a little foreshadowing of Dmitri’s later life with locomotors. Vladimir Nabokov had learned fatherhood from his own father, VD Nabokov, who boxed and fenced every morning, emerging from his practice flushed red and robust. What young Vladimir loved most about his father was “his live masculinity”: “had he caught me out in physical cowardice, he would have laid a curse on me.” His father taught him boxing and savate so he would never be cowed in the schoolyard. When young Vladimir used his superior technique to defend stuttering, squinting Nikolay Shustov from the school bullies, he was simply following his father’s code. When Dmitri was born on May 10, 1934 in Berlin, Nabokov carried this model of fatherhood forward. At age three, little Dmitri received boxing gloves. The boy landed a punch on his father’s face. Nabokov encouraged his son’s fascination with cars, planes, and trains—all the machinery of action and charged adventure. But the queer currents run through the Nabokovian work: Charles Kinbote’s flamboyant homosexuality in Pale Fire, Uncle Ruka’s fawnish caresses of young Vladimir, the homoerotic undertows in Despair, Lolita, Ada and a burgeoning queer readings on The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. In our second session, I mustered the courage to ask straight (oui, pun-intendedly): “Is Nabokov gay?” Dominique Swain as Dolores Haze in the 1997 version of Lolita, directed by Adrian Lyne Dr Boyd shook his head, puckering his lips and let out a stern, staunch “No.” But there was another current running beneath this paternal approach to Dmitri. Nabokov’s family tree harboured queer men on its shadowed limbs and sprigs. Sergey, Vladimir’s younger brother, bigger but awkward and stammering, whom Vladimir had tormented in childhood. One day, young Vladimir saw a page from Sergey’s diary, discovered his brother was homosexual, and, in “stupid wonder”, showed it to their tutor, who showed it to their father. Sergey was withdrawn from school. Years later, in 1943, Sergey was arrested in Berlin for his homosexuality. Released through Cousin Onya’s efforts, he found work in Prague, where he openly voiced his contempt for Hitler. He was rearrested and sent to Neuengamme, where he died of starvation and neglect on 10 January 1945. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov would write of him: “a gentle, courageous man.” The guilt never left. Perhaps his fierce opposition in later years to any infringement of personal privacy stemmed from that childhood betrayal, that glance at a diary and unthinking impulse to pass on his brother’s closeted sexuality. “Nabokov had uncles on both sides who were homosexual,” Dr Boyd told me. “So, he was worried there was a gene in the family, I think, and so he made a point of bringing Dmitri up to be manly.” There was Uncle Ruka, the foppish dandy who had fondled young Vladimir with unsettling intimacy. There was also Konstantin Nabokov, Vladimir’s uncle on his father’s side, whom the poet Korney Chukovsky described in his diary as a homosexual who had pursued Chukovsky relentlessly. Emaciated, gaunt-faced, wearing fine Paris-tailored suits, Konstantin followed Chukovsky on lecture tours about Oscar Wilde (how fitting!), from Moscow to Vilnius to Vitebsk, attending the same lecture over and over, staying at plush hotels, taking the poet to expensive restaurants. The solicitude, Chukovsky realised, was “the love of an urning.” Konstantin’s open admiration for Wilde and his own lived experience as a hushed gay man in the Russian diplomatic service provided some precedent for the themes of homosexual desire in Vladimir’s fiction. Dmitri became precisely what his father had sown and nurtured: a daredevil. His interests, as Nabokov reported to his sister Elena, were “mountaineering, girls, music, track, tennis and his studies (in that order).” At Jenny Lake in the Tetons, teenage Dmitri spent two weeks at the Petzoldt-Exum mountaineering school, climbing mountains along their most difficult and dangerous sides. Nabokov felt “constantly alarmed” but “could only approve of this ‘extraordinary overwhelming passion’ that meant as much to his son as his lepidoptera did to him.” Dmitri would become a champion race car driver, a mountain climber, and an opera singer. He would crash his Ferrari and survive. He would remain, as Dr Boyd noted with faint amusement, “a promiscuous philanderer” who stayed sexually active even in his wheelchair. Dr Boyd would observe that Speak, Memory is building towards Dmitri: Nabokov sets the autobiography, so it begins with his own waking consciousness and ends with the same miracle to his son. That is why Dmitri remains an emotional lever in Nabokov’s correspondence: when Véra and Dmitri select letters from the time of the 1937 affair, Dr Boyd notes those letters “make plain Nabokov’s anxiety for Véra and Dmitri to rejoin him as soon as possible.” Irina, meanwhile, kept a scrapbook of Nabokov’s successes, pasting in clippings and photographs, including photographs of Véra. She never remarried and died poor, at a home for aged Russians outside Paris, in 1976, a year before the man she had loved had expired. * But let us return to Dr Boyd; je m’éloigne du sujet. For his own seduction was proceeding apace. During his research, the Nabokov archives were dispersed between Montreux and the Library of Congress. (The Montreux papers were later sold to the New York Public Library in 1991.) From November 1979, Boyd had complete access to Nabokov’s manuscripts and almost all correspondence. Access to Nabokov’s letters to his parents came at the end of 1980, and to his diaries sometime in 1981. The rest we have never seen were either lost or remained behind Véra’s cordon sanitaire. Room 69, the chambre de débarras, lay across the corridor from room 64, the Nabokovs’ sitting room, in their suite in the Cygne wing of the Montreux Palace Hotel. From there, they had overlooked Lake Geneva for decades. Dr Boyd worked through the ton of papers and Nabokov books, cataloguing everything after 1960: from index cards, typescripts, galleys, page proofs and missives. Véra allowed him to come and go as he liked into room 69 and the unheated former laundry storeroom at the end of the corridor, which they made into the new manuscript room. For seven years, Boyd catalogued the archives intensively from November 1979 to February 1980, and again from November 1980 to February 1982, with brief revisits until about 1986-87, transcribing and indexing them for his own purposes, working there from morning till after midnight. The intimacy of the archive is a peculiar thing, ma chère. To handle a dead man’s lifework is to commune with his ghost. Boyd let himself into the archive room and the “library” in the Nabokov rooms of Hôtel du Cygne wing, often confining himself to sedulous long hours of solitude. He held the index cards, those would-be opuses, those pencil marks of panache and eloquence that Nabokov had crafted. And the discoveries came. In November 1982, at the bottom of a pile of otherwise empty boxes behind a cupboard in room 69, Boyd found a cardboard box full of manuscripts of Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature. Véra had always been perturbed that her husband’s lectures on Russian poetry could not be found. “Eureka!” Boyd wrote in headline-size capitals on a note he left for her to find the next morning. Nabokov, upon his American exile in 1940, believed himself to have obliterated Volshebnik utterly. A mistake, as it turned out. Dr Boyd discovered the original spark from which Lolita would eventually combust into being. Nor was this his only archaeological triumph. He found the peculiar photostats of Nabokov’s letters to his parents, inverted xerographs rendered in white on black that he had to hold up to a mirror to transcribe. But bits had been cut out, redacted for Field’s perusal. Dr Boyd wanted the originals, which he finally secured by November 1980. It was Véra’s oblique access to Nabokov’s love letters to her that proved most poignant. In the winter of 1984-1985, after she had seen the first chapters of Dr Boyd’s biography and realised she would not regret trusting him, she allowed him this sparse privilege. She would not let him read or hold the letters themselves. Instead, she sat at the small round dining table in her sitting room, the one where she and Vladimir had been photographed playing chess, while Boyd sat opposite and all ears. Véra was in her80ss by then, her voice still husky from a lingering cold. She would sit across from Dr Boyd at the small dining table, reading Vladimir’s letters aloud into a cassette recorder. At each passage she deemed too intimate, a single Russian word would punctuate the air: “propusk (omit),” she would announce, before moving on. Propusk. A caesura. The tape recorder whirred. Véra’s aged, Russian-inflected voice filled the room with Vladimir’s words, filtered through her discretion and memory. Boyd listened, transcribed, and envisioned the redacted endearments, the intimate particulars she would not share. “[Véra] also read my manuscript chapter by chapter as I wrote it, with a very attentive and demanding eye, and often supplied welcome new information to correct my mistaken inferences,” Boyd shares. And it dawned on me some time later that Boyd might have imbibed his fastidiousness from Véra herself. She had corrected his manuscript with her attentive, demanding eye; now he corrected mine. And what he was clamouring for—as Véra once required of him—was that a life written carelessly, once fixed into black ink, might congeal against all mortal remedy. After reading these unexpurgated parts, Dear Reader, he vented in an email: “I can see why people resist having their biography written. It was hard corrective work for a biographical and chronological pedant to undertake, but I had to do it: otherwise, this detailed account would have sown confusion that would have been very hard to undo.” This protective instinct extends beyond mere names and dates; it is a moral defence of the Nabokovs’ dignity. He is the curator of their life and light, and he suffers no shadows cast by tawdry gossip or its petty mongers. When he detected an attempt to graft unglamorous claims about Véra onto the narrative, he remonstrated with the sharp authority of a sentinel, admonishing: “I would never repeat squalid tripe.” Selected specimens from the personal collection Nabokov donated to Cornell University in 1960. Photo: Cornell University Library When Dr Boyd consulted Nabokov’s only son, Dmitri was, as Dr Boyd delicately puts it, “practically useless as an informant for the biography, because all he would do was talk in the most glowing superlatives (and “eulogistic generalizations”) about his father, rather than specific details.” In another interview (Polka, 2020), he resigned: “Perhaps [it] was my fault for not finding ways to tap the rich store of particulars he obviously retained.” “Whereas Véra, even though she was very wary, would at least give me specific information.” Dmitri had a New World openness that contrasted with his mother’s Old-World reserve. And yet, in January 1980, it was Dmitri who pressured Véra to give Dr Boyd access to the Library of Congress materials. Had it not been for the son’s intervention, the mother might have held out forever. Nonetheless, his untamed adoration was futile for scholastic ends. All ooze and squid-cloud. * Excavating Nabokov’s aristocratic and turbulent yesteryears brought no small peril in the late Soviet Union. The Nabokovs were members of the deposed Russian nobility and, as exiles, were anathema to the anti-bourgeois Marxists. The regime’s sympathisers would have carted the intellectuals to the tumbrel without hesitation. And yet, Dr Boyd went. In 1915, Vyra, Russia (outside St. Petersburg), Nabokov met a certain “Tamara” of Speak, Memory, who was 15 at the time he was 16. That summer, as he recovers from typhus, he daydreams on the linen mattress about what falling in love might be like. Her name was chiselled in random benches and wickets across the Nabokovs’ manorial premises. In July, Vladimir was invited to the nearby Rozhdestveno. Tamara came into his life among the horseflies and birches. Vladimir was ruddy and aglow with the heat of young love. In the afternoon of 9 August, within the prismatic windows of Vyra’s park pavilion, Vladimir invited Tamara and her friends for a boating trip along the Oredezh River—she turned up alone the next day. A romance began. Dr Boyd puts it: “In secluded spots among the meadows of Vyra and Rozhdestveno, the pair discovered the joys of sex”. Tamara’s real name is Valentina Shulgina. Dr Boyd travelled deep into Leningrad in search of Nabokov’s country estate. Nabokov was still persona non grata at this point, and any mention of his name might lead to interrogation, confiscation, or expulsion. He took as many photos as he could, the three Nabokov manors speckled along the Oredezh: Rozhdestveno, Vyra, and Batovo. “Nabokov’s map is wrong,” he told me, crossing red marks on the drawn plat map. With the footwork of a tourist and the eye of a thief, he caught one vista after another in silent clicks, moving among the asters, the wild junipers, and the heavy-headed dahlias. He tread the glades and bowers where Vladimir and Valentina had canoodled one immortal day. But such flashes of bliss occur in brief. At four in the late afternoon, “by which time everybody in the Soviet countryside seemed to be drunk,” an inebriated local approached. “How did you get here?” the man asked, suspicious of foreigners who could be spies. “He seemed to think that I thought the birches and the firs were well-camouflaged missiles.” Dr Boyd feigned ignorance. He replied, “By train and bus.” Together, they stood on a bridge traversing the Oredezh. “The man’s face flushed with anger; he leaned toward me, until vodka drowned out the smells of summer.” The man, reeking of a tosspot’s suspicion and rye spirit, swayed forward. A militia car just drove past them a short while ago, and his drunk comrade might call them back to arrest Boyd. As arbitrary as Soviet Russia could be, if confrontation arose, he might have been deported or hectored in a KGB black cell. “What are you doing here?” The man demanded again. Between the sot and the watery Oredezh, Dr Boyd quickly improvised an alibi. Boyd knew a path through the woods; a certain trail called Le Chemin du Pendu (The Way of the Hanged)—not too pleasing a portent. In Nabokov’s map in Speak, Memory, it undulates like the gallows onto the Batovo estate, the partially burned remnant of his grandmother’s manor. “There was a plaque commemorating the fact that the estate had once belonged to Kondraty Ryleev.” Ryleev, one of the leaders of the failed Decembrist Revolt against the Tsar in 1825, had his properties confiscated and was hanged. The Soviets hailed him with radical reverence as the forerunner of their glorious revolution. And so, he spoke: “I came to see Ryleev’s house.” With the breath laced with liquor and other foul vapour, he shouted, “Molodets!” (Attaboy!). He bearhugged Dr Boyd with the full force of his chest and arms. “You’re one of us!” He cried, tapping Boyd’s anxious back. “I nearly passed out,” Boyd says, “from relief and the fumes of his home-brew vodka.” * Late in 1984, Véra had told Dr Boyd she would “of course” eventually let him see The Original of Laura (Nabokov’s last, unfinished novel), but she offered such concessions mainly to buy time. Indeed, Nabokov had asked his wife to promise to destroy the manuscript should he not complete it. She promised but could not bring herself to carry out his directive. In February 1987, as Boyd was writing Nabokov: The American Years, she at last placed the little box of index cards on the maroon-and-silver striped period sofa on the west side of her narrow living room and monitored him from the matching sofa two meters away. He could read the manuscript only once and take no notes. He also had to agree to delete anything she wished him to write in the novel. The conditions could hardly have been worse. And yet, there they were: the germs and kernels of a novel, the pencil strokes of Nabokovian genius, laid bare. “I found myself, to my own surprise, uttering the words: ‘Destroy it.’ Nabokov had, after all, left instructions to that effect. But on rereading and rereading it, I came to endorse the publication of the novel.” “How glad I am now that they ignored my advice,” Boyd would later write, “and that their attachment to Nabokov’s work overrode even their respect for his last wish.” One recalls that in 1950 Nabokov would have burned another manuscript of another, still incomplete, book, entitled Lolita, if Véra had not stopped him on his way to the incinerator. Dr Boyd’s final memory of Véra was that she was “just very frail in a wheelchair.” In 1990, already in the apartment she had moved to from the Montreux Palace Hotel. She had bought two adjacent apartments on the slopes above Montreux on Dmitri’s advice. She lived in the larger apartment and turned the smaller one into an office, a guest room, and the archive. In that final season of her life, when the act of reading, once her greatest pleasure and her husband’s salvation from exile and obscurity, had become a torment to her aged eyes, each turned leaf an agony, Véra nonetheless kept Dr Boyd’s book by her nightstand, for re-reading it gave her only glee and gusto. Dr Boyd was touched to learn. The highest compliment a biographer can receive: to have one’s work become a solace for the subject’s widow, a reachable simulacrum to the man she had loved for over half a century and lost some fourteen odd years ago. On April 7, 1991, Véra Nabokov died. Her ashes were buried in the same urn as her husband’s, beneath the shadow of the Château de Chatelard, in Clarens cemetery at Montreux. Their grave is marked by a broad, unornamented slab of marble, a deep bruised blue in colour, with the terse inscription: “VLADIMIR NABOKOV / ECRIVAIN / VERA NABOKOV.” “I would have loved Nabokov to have been able to read it,” Boyd told me, “but then I wouldn’t have been able to write it as freely as I had. But that was the next best thing.” * In 1983, Dr Boyd began to draft the Nabokov biography on a Commodore 64 desktop, the cheapest one he could find. The licensed clone of MS-DOS crashed ever so often. He would hold his breath before it booted, and sometimes it didn’t. When it did, he would stare at the green phosphor screen and the unblinking cursor glitch, waiting for the machine to decide whether his day’s work would survive. After finishing the first Nabokov volume, the same computer went full haywire, and his files got locked out. The biography of the century’s greatest prose stylist, bested by bloatwares and meretricious machines. Bronwen Nicholson, his wife, helped retype the entire manuscript from the printouts, with assistance from her boss’s big-hearted wife (also named Bronwen). For Vladimir, there was Véra, who typed and retyped his novels, who shielded him from the world’s intrusions. For Brian, there was Bronwen (who rejected my encroachment after asking the couples for a pose). Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years appeared in 1990. The sequel, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, followed in 1991. Together, they constituted the definitive biography, the monument Boyd had spent a decade constructing. Alfred Appel Jr., who had been Nabokov’s student at Cornell and remained a close friend, told Boyd that Nabokov was “the most fun to be with of any person he’d ever met.” Boyd had never met Nabokov. But over a decade of archival immersion, he had come to know him intimately. The New York Times Book Review called it “a definitive life of the man and a superbly documented chronicle of his time.” Sergei Davydov, in October 1990, further adds, “Mr Boyd has a remarkable gift for drawing life and literature together. . . .[What he does] in this impressive biography reveals to us a Nabokov who has been far too little known... As a biography, [Boyd’s] book can hardly be surpassed.” Vladimir Nabokov, 1973. Source: Wikipedia In the interim, Andrew Field had not gone quietly. When he heard that Boyd was writing Nabokov’s biography, he reissued his own 1977 Nabokov: His Life in Part, integrated with his other publications. Véra and Dmitri both urged Boyd to say something about the errors and animus of Field’s new book. The second Nabokov conference was held at Yale in 1987. Field and Boyd were both there, but they did not talk. Bizarrely, Boyd was scheduled to speak immediately before Field. “I began by saying,” Boyd recalled, “Before I get to my own presentation, I must say something about the work of Andrew Field, not on Véra’s or Dmitri’s behalf, but on behalf of Nabokov and the truth.” Boyd was focused on the lectern, but friends told him afterwards that Field immediately turned white and left the lecture theatre, claiming later he had urgent photocopying to do. Boyd reviewed Field’s new biography for the Times Literary Supplement. “Field did not reply in the TLS, but in a foreword to the paperback edition complained that the world-wide dismissal of his work by Nabokov scholars was proof of a Nabokov mafia, established by Godfather Nabokov.” The feud reached its climax in a London courtroom. On January 5, 1992, David Sexton of The Sunday Telegraph reviewed the second volume of Boyd’s Nabokov biography. Sexton, who had completed his Nabokov dissertation at Cambridge, wrote: “Thank goodness, we do not have to put up any longer with Field’s incompetence and malice.” Field took Sexton’s views as slanderous. “Field was at Griffith University in Brisbane, and had dinner with his vice chancellor. He said to him, ‘What are you going to do about this?’ He felt he needed to bring a libel suit against the Sunday Telegraph [Trevor Grove, its former editor] and David Sexton, their associate literary editor. “ Taking them to court, he did. The trial was expected to last for two weeks. The defence summoned Dr Boyd: “I was called to testify to his incompetence, which was pretty easy.” Paul Chipchase of Cambridge was called to prove Field’s malice. Dimitri Nabokov would testify to the vexation Field had caused to his father, while Field represented himself, pro se. Field committed major lapses in recalling dates. “He did say that the Russian Revolution happened in 1916, and I challenged him on this, and he came back and committed five major historical errors in a single sentence.” On the first day, the judge asked, as a matter of factual clarification: “Could you tell me when Speak, Memory was written?” Boyd: “Field just looked blank as if it was a trick question. He couldn’t answer it. The defence lawyer got up, flicked open Speak, Memory, and read from the first paragraph where Nabokov tells exactly when it was written.” “That night, Field did not sleep at all,” Dr Boyd leaned forward. “The next morning, he was catatonic, unable to speak. At the beginning of the second day, his wife had to ask the judge to withdraw the case. We did not even get to testify to his incompetence and malice.” The Nabokovian reported: “Despite spending almost two years to secure a trial, Field dropped the case after less than an hour under cross-examination. In withdrawing his charges, he also had to pay court costs of £25,000.” In compiling his 1977 and 1986 versions of Nabokov’s biography, Boyd later wrote, Field had enacted in real life the roles of Nabokov’s two invented inept biographers: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’s Mr. Goodman, happily ignorant because so serenely confident of the power of conjecture, and Pale Fire’s Kinbote, who intrudes on the privacy of John Shade but misconstrues everything because his own desire for glory gets in the way. In 1969, Time magazine assembled editorial notes for a cover story on Nabokov’s Ada. An excerpt from those unpublished files described Field as a man with “a reputation for aggressiveness and arrogance” who “appears to have settled on Nabokov for his life’s work.” The note concluded with a barbed observation: “Nabokov may know a Quilty when he sees one.” Field was devastated. He devoted nearly 20 pages of his biography to attacking Time magazine—a statistic that, as Boyd later observed, suggested Field’s ego was as much to the fore in the biography as Nabokov’s own life. * Dr Boyd, when pressed on matters political, confessed himself “a frustrated left-of-centre” soul who watches governments of every stripe fumble the scales of economic equity. He spoke of universal basic income with the cautious optimism of a man who has read too much history to trust in panaceas: “Where it’s been tried, it’s been extraordinarily successful. Hasn’t been tried in whole countries yet, but it’s been tried in local areas.” He has written letters to the Herald in support of such policies; they were never published. The media, he mused, his lips settling into a subdued half-smile, “doesn’t seem to be very receptive to different ideas.” And the world itself? He paused, his gaze drifting toward the sun’s faltering light. “A ghastly mess. The world is very unstable... and Trump makes it more unstable.” One sensed in his reticence the scholar’s instinctive withdrawal from the tumult of headlines—a preference for the longer view, the patient accumulation of pattern over the febrile knocks of the news cycle. There are hours, in the brumal twilight of a scholar’s life, when even the sturdiest faith falters. “In fact,” Dr Boyd admitted to me with disarming candour, “the last time I doubted myself severely was about yesterday, or certainly this week.” And one wondered, watching him frown at his papers in the slanted afternoon light, whether Karl Popper, the philosopher chosen to expand his horizons towardautres rivages, had become yet another cruise into the maritime doldrums. And yet, lecteur, consider the accolades that have accumulated around this preeminent scholar like the crown of laurels upon the vir triumphalis. In 2001, the Einhard Prize for Biography, Germany’s singular biennial honour, recognised his work as nothing less than biography as art. Dr Boyd told me he had “a terrible cold” and was “sneezing all the time” during his acceptance speech. The New York Times had called him an “academic superstar.” Then, in November 2020, the Rutherford Medal, New Zealand’s highest research honour, was bestowed upon him with $100,000 attached. For three decades, the medallion had been reserved exclusively for the nation’s most distinguished scientists. It was the first year the Academy widened its scope to embrace the humanities. Dr Boyd became the first humanities scholar ever to receive it—a breakthrough that vindicated literary scholarship as equal to scientific achievement. The Royal Society recognised his “world-leading research... especially on the great twentieth-century novelist Vladimir Nabokov.” Still, he donated his prize money to scholarships for first-generation university students, those who, like himself, were the first in their families to grace the hallowed precincts of academia. As the day peeled to eventide, a strange crepuscular halation had saturated the room, the aureate glow from the ginkgo vied in beauty and animation with the shades and sunlight rippling on the warm kauri table wood. “When we were in Japan, we thought the tree might have already lost its leaves. We’ve forgotten exactly when it turns golden.” He went on, “We both love Japan. We stayed in Kyoto...” His eyes brightened at the memory. “We got these free bikes. We just love cycling in Kyoto. You cycle on the footpath, on the road, in either direction... constantly weaving... It’s high alertness.... [But] I had a job. I don’t think I could live in Japan. The languages, too difficult to learn...” I shifted my eyes, tracing the mountain lines of the ukiyo-e seascape on the dining wall, hanging behind Dr Boyd across the expanse of the kitchen. Beyond the glass, a lone koinobori twisted in the erratic breeze. One understood immediately: the mesmeric pull of the Orient and embraced the buxom Earth, the peonies of pleasure, the siren-song of ailleurs. Yet always there remained the tether, the invisible umbilicus of a calling to their home hearth. I asked him what he loved most about Bronwen. “Her unpretentiousness,” he said, the words possessing a quiet, rhythmic clarity. “Her sense of humour. She laughs at my jokes. And her kindness—her particular gifts as a mother.” He spoke of their shared cartography of taste, their mutual devotion to the same literary and artistic latitudes. As an art historian, she mirrored his own forensic gaze. “We’ve seen many, many films together... Tokyo Story by Ozu, certainly my favourite, and Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner).” He narrated the Inuit epic with smidgens of small success: “She was wary of its three-hour breadth. I saw it on a Saturday and, gripped by its frozen brilliance, dragged her to the final screening the next day. She was captivated.” “In all our time, I think there are only twice that we’ve disagreed.” Je le redis. For Vladimir, there was Véra. For Brian, there is Bronwen. Dr Boyd’s hands rest on his father’s copy of Ada, bearing his father’s stamp inside, represents a poignant connection between the two pillars of Dr Boyd’s life: Boyd’s father, who gave him the book though he could not read Nabokov; and Nabokov, whose prose changed Boyd’s life at age when he encountered Pale Fire. The book sits on Boyd’s desk as a reminder that art, as Nabokov wrote, is ‘the only immortality you and I may share.’ In his study, across the hall, he keeps a fissured Styrofoam tray wrapped in plastic. It’s from his Nabokov studies in Europe and America. It houses his index cards, plain and gridded, sorted with alphabetical tab dividers, and colour-coded stickers. He lifts a paper slip from a pocket, showing me the blue and black jottings: “Limone Piemonte. 27 June 1967. The butterflies here are all that VN had hoped for.” I looked to the south, across the hearth, and there fixed on a frame were scales and shingles of white, black, and iridescent powder blue. “Is that a painting?” I probed. “No. That’s Lycaeides melissa samuelis. From Fiona Pardington,” he said. The Karner blue that Nabokov discovered, now part of an art collection: magnified specimens from New York and Lausanne. Pardington (a Nabokov fan) wanted to photograph Nabokov’s butterflies, their faerie-dusted wings, with finer eyes. * On July 2, 1977, Vladimir Nabokov succumbed to acute bronchitis at a hospital in Lausanne, after a recidivous ailment. Boyd learned of the death in Toronto 11 months into his doctoral dissertation on Ada. He was petrified in firebolts of grief and disbelief. The photographs showed Nabokov robust and vigorous, hiking up alpine slopes with a butterfly net in hand. The master’s prose radiated such strength and permanence that death seemed impossible. How could mortality claim someone whose writing felt so invulnerable? In the summer of 1976, visiting Europe for the first time and resolved to switch from John Barth to Nabokov’s Ada, Boyd ventured into the Montreux Palace Hotel and left a note for Nabokov, “but did not dare ask to meet him.” He did not know that Nabokov was already hospitalised that summer, already grappling with his final decline. So, when the news came a year later, the shock-jolt was profound. The writer whose work Boyd had committed himself to studying was gone before they could ever meet. “Yes and no,” he told me when I asked if it pained him never to have met Nabokov. He acknowledged the bittersweet quality of this timing. Boyd might have been too apprehensive to approach him until after completing his PhD. But by then, he would have been confident. But that confidence came too late. Had Nabokov lived, Boyd would have been delighted for him to read the doctoral thesis, which was far more accomplished than the MA thesis written in six weeks at 21. He believes Nabokov would have been moved to see someone who understood his thinking so deeply and solved some of the most hidden riddles in Ada. But meeting Nabokov might have meant less access to the archive. Nabokov, woefully burned by Field, might have been more vigilant and circumspect. Véra, by contrast, trusted him entirely. “It was a disappointment, in a sense.” * Though Nabokov has long since perished into the fading alpenglow of senescence and mortality, his legacy remains a breathing, bright presence in the darkling view—rising among the dark drowsy fields, nacreous pearls and sunken agates, and the sherry-red letters of motel light. I leaned across the domestic expanse and asked: “Why do stories such as Lolita matter today?” “They show us the bounds of human possibility,” his quick-sure reply. “What do you think Nabokov achieved in Lolita?” “I think what he does is show how consciousness, which he sees as an instrument of freedom, is used as an instrument of entrapment by Humbert.” At the University of Auckland library, about 1995, there was a new books display where recently catalogued volumes were displayed for a fortnight. One day, Boyd spotted a title: Mind Blindness. He liked that. He picked it up and started reading, and was taken by the introducer’s account of evolutionary psychology. “I became more and more interested in why we’re storytelling animals,” he explained. In 2009, he published On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, proposing an evolutionary and cognitive account of art in general, narrative in general, and fiction in particular. His examples: Homer’s Odyssey (a narrative masterpiece as close as we can get to the origin of stories in our species) and Dr Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! (a masterpiece accessible to children near the beginning of their engagement with stories). “My core theory,” Boyd told me, “Is that art is a kind of cognitive play with pattern. And I hadn’t realised it until retrospectively, in fact, it was Bronwen’s brother, who teaches at Harvard, who saw it. Nobody, no writer, is as playful as Nabokov, and no writer is as highly patterned. And so those two things that are core to Nabokov, I wasn’t even thinking about Nabokov at all when I was writing On the Origin of Stories, and the only time he appears in that book, I think, is in one epigraph. But I retrospectively realised that Nabokov had shaped my mind enough to give me that kind of sense.” * As his current preoccupation, he sent me some of his papers on Nabokov and Popper. Boyd sees fascinating convergences between them. On the question of time’s forward motion, like an arrow shot from a bow, it flies from past to present to future, and you can never retrieve it or reverse its course. Nabokov denies it while Popper defends it, yet Boyd suggests they may ultimately mean the same thing. Both share similar values: viewing scientific theories as provisional and stressing the relationship between creativity and criticism. Both saw scientific theories as provisional. Nabokov described them as “always the temporary groping for truth of more or less gifted minds which gleam, fade, and are replaced by others,” a conception almost exactly like Popper’s. Both stressed the relationship between creativity and criticism in artistic and scientific discovery. These convergences are Boyd’s intellectual throughline. He moves from Nabokov (artist-scientist) to Popper (philosopher-scientist) following the same pattern: freedom, openness, discovery, critique. The Popper biography is now 30 years in progress, when he thought it would take five. But he remains optimistic, “I think I’m a year and a half away,” he told me (mid-June 2025). “Nabokov shaped my mind, but so did others, and I tried to keep my independence. I am writing a biography of the philosopher Karl Popper now—much more difficult than the Nabokov biography—and was already deeply interested in Popper during the years I was writing my dissertation and the Nabokov biography. Popper was intellectually antithetical in some ways to Nabokov: both loved freedom and the endlessness of discovery, but one loved words and had little time for ideas, the other the converse.” Dr Boyd signing Justin Agluba’s two hardback copies of Lolita (one Penguin Classics, the other by Library of America, which Boyd edited). I’m in awe of his vivacity and enthusiasm at such an age. He was, by some measure, past the age of laurels, retiring from academia in 2020, but still he plied the literary spadework that occupied all his life. “What would you say to your parents,” I pressed, “given the vastness and magnitude of what you have achieved thus far?” “Thanks,” he said soundlessly. “I wish you could read it.” And, at last, the sun of our colloquy had set. I had palpated the very flesh of fate... Dr Boyd autographed my two hardback copies of Lolita (one he edited), signing: For Justin—enthusiastic interrogator! Fat Fate’s formal handshake (as reproduced in two curled swoops of belleterist “BB”) brought me out of my torpor, and I wept. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury—I wept! At the doorway, I offered my requisite hat tip as he sent me off from their amber-lit sage-green porch. A parting line: “See you at school.” He broke a smile at that and gave an almost ceremonial wave of farewell as I descended to the eve’s darkness. From outside, the city’s sodium glow steadily effaces the wash of stars against the plumbaceous umbra of the moon. I looked ahead of the visible road, the comings, goings, the traffic and travails that lay ahead under the waning gibbous. Dr Boyd’s house receded behind me, and I recalled some spectral colour wheel of light radiating across a white house wall, throwing shadows and light into the cold winter heavens and the stillness of the night. Before leaving, I had asked him: “Would you trade your copy of Ada for a moment in the past?” There was some pensive hum, a twitch of the lips and a heaved exhale, as if preparing a “No.” “I remember a time when I was tramping in the Ruahine near Palmerston North,” he told me. “I was sixteen or seventeen. It was terribly sleety and cold. I thought we were all going to die of exposure. But then we crossed a ridge. We were suddenly out of the wind. I’ve never had my emotions change so much from very strongly negative to exhilaration so rapidly. We were in this snowy forest where everything seemed still. It was just magical. And that stays with me.” “I can relive them in memory. That’s enough.” And the rest is rust and stardust. Finis, my friends, finis!