ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I examine a number of Vladimir Nabokov’s American texts,
with a special focus on Pale Fire (1989a), asking how his literary production
can be contextualized in and how it reflects on the intellectual climate of the
Cold War in the United States and the treatment of Russian dissidents. Of
particular interest is how Nabokov’s oeuvre participates in American poli-
tical and cultural attempts to understand, ‘‘figure out,’’ praise, and/or reject
the communist ‘‘other,’’ Soviet Russia. Nabokov arrives in the United States at the beginning of World War II and leaves it for Switzerland before that
tumultuous decade the 1960s begins. His presence and influence in the
American intellectual landscape, nevertheless, is prominent both while he is
in the United States and when he is away: he speaks to America when he
publishes his autobiographical writings in the New Yorker in the late 1940s
and desecrates many proprieties with Lolita (1955) in the 1950s as much as
when he gives numerous interviews and ‘‘strong opinions’’ in Montreaux,
Switzerland, in the 1960s (many addressing the political and cultural upheavals in America, Cold War topics, and Soviet politics). He speaks to
America, I say, because Nabokov’s self-fashioning – his literary self-production –
as a dissident, Russian-American author, as an expert on all things Russian,
is in a way inseparable from his insistence on apprising the American public
of the evils of ‘‘Leninization’’1 and of Russia’s short-lived, but crucial
potential for (Western) liberal development, embodied by enlightened e´migre´s
like Nabokov himself.
