Vladimir Nabokov

Character Analysis

With Vladimir Nabokov, you get two characters for the price of one! On one hand, you've got the poor little rich boy, Vladimir, who we follow through his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. On the other hand, you've got an obsessive, heady writer-narrator, who can't stop futzing with his own book. Having both Vladimir Nabokovs on the page pays off, though, because we readers get on-the-ground observation and scene, while the author feeds us context, insta-destinies of most characters (read: the way they die), and what it feels like to remember a carefree childhood while knowing the difficult ordeals to come.

Privileged Snob or Dreamer with His Head in the Clouds?

At times, it can be hard to root for moody, dreamy Vladimir, who has just about everything a boy could want and dozens of mansion rooms to keep it all in. It's true that his father is doing dangerous work, but the boy is hardly affected: even when his mom is worried, waiting for his father to call and confirm his bodily safety, she still has love and lots encouragement for her son on the advent of writing his first poem. Later, when his father sends him to a real school with boys of all backgrounds, he prefers to be driven there in the family's limo, and can't really understand when the administration asks, could he please get dropped off a couple blocks away from school so his wealth doesn't get shoved in everyone else's face? We know—the nerve.

Sympathy comes to Vladimir when his troubles start and he eventually loses pretty much everything. Nabokov writes:

I was too much absorbed by the usual delights of youth—youth that was rapidly losing its initial, non-usual fervor—either to derive any special pleasure from the legacy or to experience any annoyance when the Bolshevik Revolution abolished it overnight. (3.6.1)

Gone are the mansions, the library, most of the house staff, the cars...even if one was taken apart and buried by a well-meaning servant, to avoid its confiscation, it's never recovered anyway. As he grows from a young teen to a proper man, it becomes clear that his moodiness and dreaminess are functions of his high intellect. It isn't that he's [only] a brat, he's also very sensitive writer, who falls into lost-time trances while composing poetry and chess problems. And ultimately, we get to see how all of this time pays off, by getting to Nabokov the Writer and Storyteller, the accomplished man Vladimir has become.

Long-Winded or Admirably Sensitive?

Maybe both. We know, we know, this book isn't an easy read. Nabokov's narrative voice is super thick. Check this sentence out, for example:

One is moved to speak more eloquently about these things, about many other things that one always hopes might survive captivity in the zoo of words—but the ancient limes crowding close to the house drown Mnemosyne's monologue with their creaking and heaving in the restless night. (12.1.7)

Yeah...Sometimes you've just got to break out the dictionary. Because reading a Nabokov book isn't just about getting the story, the themes, the imagery, and all the rest. It's also about learning. Nabokov is a teacher who uses fifty cent words: you can't always understand him right off the bat, but it's worth it to spend the extra time and have your own fifty cent words to show off, too.

If Vladimir the Poor Little Rich Boy gives us everything we need to know about the grounds at Vyra, and what Tamara looked like when she spoke, Nabokov the Writer is able to give us the back-story, the political landscape at the time, and what each of his childhood events have come to mean to him now. In a lot of ways, it's the best of both worlds, and we get to read his life story from two perspectives at once.

Example: he and cousin Yuri pretend to be frontiersmen in the desert, never having set foot on anything like non-beach sand. So later in life, while Nabokov is in Utah, spending time in the desert? Of course he thinks of Yuri. Nabokov's storytelling is all about patterns and echoes, and the ability to make sensitive connections across space and time. That's what makes him a valuable character.

One Weird Exception

It's difficult to read this book and not think of Vladimir as some delicate flower type. But a couple times in the book, Nabokov refers to his own silliness, interest in sports, and love of practical jokes, like when he describes his relationship with his father:

Our relationship was marked by that habitual exchange of homespun nonsense, comically garbled words, proposed imitations of supposed intonations, and all those private jokes which are the secret code of happy families. (9.5.7)

Later, when Nesbit and his crew at Cambridge disapprove of his non-writing hobbies (they "frowned upon various other things I went in for, such as entomology, practical jokes, girls, and, especially, athletics." (13.4.2), we learn pages later that even in his obsession over being a goalie, he often daydreams about poetry during games, and is pretty bad playing soccer, anyway.

So Nabokov never gives us any physical evidence of this silly, free-wheeling figure he sees himself as, and we're forced to wonder: Nabokov, were you ever actually silly, or is it just something you said because it deemed to round out your character? It's definitely something to ponder.