The term “Nabokovian” can be found in dictionaries, and various authors and scholars have used it to describe a particular style of writing, marked by density, allusiveness, punning, and parodic playfulness. Marietta Bozovic's fascinating study offers a new way of understanding Nabokov's legacy as a construction of a transnational literary canon characterized by cultural syncretism and intermedial fluidity. It is these two attributes of Nabokov's own artistic practice, Bozovic argues, that such diverse writers as Azar Nafizi, Orhan Pamuk, and W.G. Sebald find inspiring and endeavor to appropriate for specific political goals in their own work. Nabokov's Canon, then, is at its most intriguing when it identifies Nabokov's emancipatory aesthetic strategies. In this respect, the book offers a valuable counter-narrative to those critical appraisals that stress Nabokov's authoritarianism and impingement on readers' freedom as well as those that imagine Nabokov's staunch high modernism to be passé and politically useless.
Writing against the grain of the common perception of Nabokov as a rigid elitist, Bozovic highlights the loci of cultural hybridity in his art. The book's central premise holds that in his scholarship and art Nabokov deliberately constructs a transnational literary canon so as to demarginalize the Russian novel and carve a rightful lineage for his own creations. It is with that purpose in mind, Bozovic maintains, that Nabokov initiates his highly contentious translation of and Commentary to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
Bozovic's groundbreaking study gives Nabokov's work on Onegin, which has often been treated as an embarrassing elephant in the room, central placement within Nabokov's artistic project. Despite the misunderstanding and mockery of his contemporaries, Nabokov once expressed his belief that his Onegin project would monumentalize his memory. Bozovic takes Nabokov's assertion seriously, treating his mammoth Commentary on Onegin as a key to understanding his artistic goals. The unwieldy Commentary, along with another behemoth, Ada, or Ardor, serve Bozovic as crucial texts/vectors for understanding Nabokov's conceptualization of cultural evolution. On one end of the journey into Nabokov's canon formation is Eugene Onegin, a work preoccupied with timeliness, on the other is Ada, which serves as a vehicle into timelessness. Nabokov finds an apt precursor for his own work in Onegin, where Pushkin succeeds in channeling the anxiety over Russia's cultural belatedness into proto-modernist accelerated innovation. In Ada Nabokov's orientation shifts from acceleration to transcendence; via romantic irony, the author metaliteralizes his pursuits and escapes the self.
On one hand, Bozovic's book is an admirable exercise in faultless academic prose and it offers its revisions, arguments, and debunkings politely; on the other, it shares with its subject a chameleonic ability to mimic elements of other genres for a multi-layered composition and stimulating effect. Bozovic justifies the existence of scandalous books with scholarly and analytical rigor, while building upon their frisson of illicit excitement. Consider her choice of words: “pursuit,” “thievery,” “the scene of the crime,” and “smuggling.” Explaining how the Pushkinian leap from being late into arriving early is achieved, Bozovic advances the ethics and aesthetics of theft. Nabokov's commentary, she argues, is dedicated to tracing “what and how Pushkin borrows, and how wittily he thieves, adapts, and improves” (69).
A diligent student of Nabokov's own artistic method would recognize in this portrayal of the artist as an ingenious smuggler who polishes hackneyed European jewels Nabokov himself. Bozovic argues persuasively that Nabokov's understanding of affinity has nothing to do with environmental forces, but rather with the subjective agency of authors. Thefts and parodic appropriations are mechanisms of evolutionary change, while its main principle is translation, between languages, cultures, and media. Ada translates artistic practices of Nabokov's transnationally canonical authors, Chateaubriand, Byron, Pushkin, Proust, and Joyce, into a pointedly internationalist Russo-American novel: “Shared literature provides a common language, idiosyncratic and yet potentially more international than English, French, or Russian” (109).
For all the insinuations that we are in the midst of a criminal enterprise, Bozovic is intent on concentrating on Nabokov's gifts to world literature. That is why, Nabokov appears in this text as a “cultural ambassador,” a translator, and a rescuer. I admire the positive impulse behind the book that does not confuse critical rigor with critical malice. In a perfectly calibrated effort, Bozovic also manages to escape the other end of the spectrum, falsely unclouded celebration, by pointing out how Nabokov slyly undercuts his own triumphalist claims with romantic irony.
All in all, Bozovic's penetrating analysis relies on the recent findings in narratology, canon studies, sociology of literature, and system network theory, and yet the application of her multifarious method is unmatched in its lucidity and persuasiveness. The book is simply a pleasure to read.
