Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita by Robert Roper

But he did love America -- many things about vulgar far-flung America.
--Richard Roper, Nabokov in America (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Vladimir Nabokov is one of my favorite writers and I never tire of re-reading his books or reading new insights into his work.  Roper does not have much in the way of detail to add to Brian Boyd's two-volume biography (Princeton University Press, 1991) but he does bring his own views as a novelist to bear on Nabokov's works, giving precise details of Nabokov's life in America, where he began as a butterfly collector for the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and the American Museum of Natural History.

Nabokov's life has many interesting parallels with that of Georgian George Balanchine, who was five years younger than Nabokov and also spent time in France before coming to America, achieving fame in the 1950's by making many wonderful ballets that showed an intense influence of America combined with a detailed knowledge of Russian classical and folk dance, from Serenade to Western Symphony, Stars and Stripes and beyond.  Roper barely mentions Balanchine, who was great friends with Stravinsky (and did many ballets to his music) and used the music of Vladimir's cousin, Nicolas Nabokov, for his elegiac Don Quixote.

One of the many pleasures of re-reading Nabokov is the richness of his vocabulary, especially compared to the impoverished vocabulary of many contemporary novels.  Roper himself is somewhat sesquipedalian and is unafraid to use appropriate words, such as supercilious, riparian and flaneur.  He is also quite good with metaphors and similes, something increasingly rare with writers of both fiction and non-fiction (editors seem to think, probably correctly, that most people will not understand them!)

I don't know how many people remember the feud between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, over Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, but Roper brings this alive, vividly evoking a time (1965)  when such things mattered to more people than they do now.  Roper is not only conversant with all of Nabokov's novels, in great detail, but he has mastered most of the secondary material and has excellent (implied) suggestions about what else to read.