Maxim D Shrayer's Reading List

"This is my favourite collection, and a lot of my own work on Nabokov deals with the stories. About 60 of them were written in Russian, ten in English. They cover four decades of Nabokov’s literary life and are representative of his dynamic as a writer both in Russian and in English, and as both a European and an American émigré. If you want to see his various predilections, the aesthetics and politics of Nabokov’s work, then the stories are a great place to go. Nabokov leaves a mark on the genre – some have argued that they are among the very best Russian, European, American short stories ever written. They are a great example of late, blazing modernism. After Lolita made Nabokov famous, he oversaw the enterprise of Englishing his Russian works, and the stories are done very well. Back in the 1930s – he was already a famous émigré author but unknown in the English-speaking world – several stories had been translated, by Gleb Struve and others. In the 1940s Nabokov had collaborated with a man by the name of Petr Pertzoff, producing exemplary translations of his finest Russian stories. Subsequently, he worked closely with his son Dmitri Nabokov, who is a dedicated son and a gifted translator. Vladimir Nabokov would say that, unless a translator was working directly from the Russian, they should work from an existing English translation – not necessarily a kosher procedure, strictly speaking, but a valid one in Nabokov’s case. If you were to compare some of the Russian originals with the English versions line by line, they would not be identical. But Nabokov got to have a second go at the stories, in a way, and he made changes. I don’t want to say he improved them, but they tell a more complete story – in English – of his literary career. Nabokov’s stories go back to Chekhov and Bunin and the great Russian love story, in which desire and memories interact, mostly in unhappy ways for the characters, but happily for the reader. The writing displays the perfect command of the form. In ‘Spring in Fialta’, penned in 1936, an artist realises that the death of his beloved has been a turning point of his own artistic creativity. But the stories, art and artistry notwithstanding, do address politics and ideology, too. It amazes me to this day that some readers think of Nabokov as this ivory tower artist, a vertiginous craftsman above all, without knowing or acknowledging that at key points he was capable of expressing his strong ethical and historical views in no uncertain terms. He might have been the first American writer, for example, to write about the falsification of the Holocaust , in a story published in the New Yorker in June 1945. So there is a lot there in the stories. They are a treasure trove."

"I love Glory and am in a minority group among Nabokov fans in that. Andrei Bitov, a prominent Russian author who had first read Nabokov in Soviet samizdat, once declared that you were either a Gift -ist or a Glory -ist. If I had to choose I would say I am a Glory -ist. In some ways, it is the most purely Nabokovian novel. In the aftermath of the Russian revolution , Martin (in Russian, Martyn) Edelweiss, a part-Swiss Russian émigré, finds himself at Cambridge, where Nabokov himself went. Estranged from his surroundings, Martin contemplates crossing the border from Latvia into the Soviet Union where he plans to do something, perhaps political subterfuge. But really it is not essentially about politics or ideology but about the character’s disappearance into the realm of pure art. The end is incredibly haunting. Martin’s English friend Darwin (a very suggestive name) brings news of Martin’s disappearance to his mother. There is a path winding through the woods. The end. Nabokov hinted at wanting to take all the people out of fiction so that it should be more like a landscape painting, a pure realm, a path winding into perfect art. It’s very hard to do this in the practice of fiction – you can’t be too schematic and theoretical, but you can’t underplay the narrative hand, either. Imagine, the years are 1930-32, Nabokov was still a young writer, it was his fourth novel, and in a sense his vision here is so complete. Glory is a Russian novel written in Berlin, originally serialised in an émigré quarterly, and many years later translated into English by Dmitri Nabokov and his father – very well translated, I think."

"I deliberately chose Glory over The Gift , but I have to get the American years in. There is Lolita in the back of everybody’s mind, of course, and 95 per cent of the students who take my undergraduate course are doing it because of Lolita . But I’m choosing Pnin instead for two reasons. Firstly, Lolita looms so large that I don’t have to choose it, but, secondly, because Pnin is the immigrant of Nabokov’s American novels. The main character is a Russian professor at an American college, and the novel is to a large extent about Russian culture misunderstood by Westerners. But it is also a truncated love story with a moral dilemma. Pnin himself is not Jewish but Mira, once Pnin’s beloved, is Jewish, and she died in Buchenwald. The story is punctuated by the tension of his trying to forget and being incapable of unremembering. Nabokov was one of the very first American writers to write extensively about the Shoah in a work of fiction. Nabokov wrote Pnin in the 1950s and parts of it were published in the New Yorker , so it is astounding how far ahead of his literary contemporaries Nabokov was in his thinking about the Shoah and how it might be remembered and memorialised. Slightly. Not in any direct way, but insofar as Pnin is a Russian intellectual in America in the post-war period, and also in the main character’s connection with a female Jewish identity. Nabokov’s wife, Véra Nabokov (born Slonim), was Jewish. So, yes, Nabokov is mulling over themes he mulled over throughout his life – here he does not reference his life so much as his thinking. Pnin is a novel about Holocaust memory and the kinds of things that other European émigré intellectuals – Adorno, Arendt – were thinking about at the time. Yet Nabokov creates a perfect work of art, a work that succeeds on aesthetic grounds but does not distract the reader from the various political, intellectual and philosophical battles of his novel. Pnin has survivor’s guilt, though he is not guilty. He keeps seeing and imagining how Mira died in Buchenwald. Then Pnin doesn’t get the tenure he was after, at which point Nabokov pulls a trick that he pulls again and again – putting himself into the story. A great Russian émigré called ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich’ arrives to take over, in the way he may well have done at Cornell in reality, and he offers Pnin the chance to stay on. Pnin doesn’t want to exist in a world where the authorial presence is so close and so in charge, so Nabokov releases Pnin. Pnin departs, but his legend lives on. Nabokov ends his novel with Pnin’s disappearance and also with a joke that takes us back to the beginning."

"Note that I’m deliberately choosing English-language books on Nabokov that are in print and are likely to remain in print for the years to come. There are a number of wonderful books by other Nabokov scholars, some of these books no longer available in print. So, Boyd’s biography… It’s huge. Two enormous volumes. Monumental. It still remains the single most important book on Nabokov, having eclipsed a lot of things when it was published. It is reliable and readable. Boyd had access to Nabokov family materials. The field has changed in the past 20 years and there have been other biographies, including two Russian-language ones, neither one particularly outstanding. If I’m asked which biography is the best, I’d say the Boyd, even though I do have some reservations about it. I think in a way it’s almost too perfect, and in places it perfects and corrects Nabokov himself. That’s not to say that Boyd is avoiding contention or does not ask the hard questions, but you wonder if the story isn’t told almost exclusively through the Nabokovian lens. But we could not have done without Boyd’s work in the field. It’s hard to write a biography in English of a person who is equally important to Russian, European and American cultures without getting bogged down in various cultural or ideological contexts. For example, Nabokov’s great personal tragedy was that he wasn’t a great Russian poet. It had always been his ambition and it continued to be his ambition, but by the early-1930s he was writing less poetry, and when he resumed, off and on, he seemed to sense his limitations. Not that as a poet he wasn’t an accomplished craftsman, but Nabokov’s poetry lacked genius, a unique intonation. If you read a poem by Blok or Akhmatova, you would know it was written by them. With Nabokov’s poetry you probably wouldn’t know. This was a huge source of dissatisfaction to him as an artist, and in the story of his life it deserves more attention. I suppose it would probably be a cavil to say that in Boyd’s biography the map of 20th-century Russian literature has one principal edifice. Some of the Russian works and authors, both Soviet and émigré, who had influenced Nabokov in profound and various ways, appear as hillocks and mounds, not literary mountains. It’s a bit like a map Nabokov himself might have drawn. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Another underappreciated matter would be the importance to Nabokov of his marriage to a Jewish woman and the effect that had on his life and career. I think it changed him as a person. Nabokov had to negotiate Jewish questions in his marriage, his son was halachically Jewish, he stayed in Nazi Germany until 1937 with a Jewish wife and son… but also it affected his writing and vision. I think there is a web of Jewish references and a significant trace of Judaism that we are only beginning to come to terms with in Nabokov’s writing. The late Véra Nabokov and Dmitri Nabokov participated in the creation of Boyd’s biography as advisers and readers, and they have both been reticent on this and other matters."

"I like this book very much. It’s short and beautifully illustrated, and you can read it in one sitting. When I teach graduate students I make them read it before the first session of the seminar, so that they have an overview in advance. Thirty years ago Grayson wrote a very important book called Nabokov Translated; she is a serious scholar. But this is a slender book for the general public, and it does not shy away from the hard questions. Well, consider this, for example. The year is 1937, and Nabokov is in the grip of a passionate love affair in Paris, all the while sending tender letters full of affection that a person couldn’t fake back to Véra, who is in Berlin with their son. And yet he is … he is with another woman. Soon after his reunion with his family in Czechoslovakia in May 1937, Nabokov wrote the story ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’, in which he talks about addressing a real person, the only woman he has ever loved but cannot be with. And there is an otherworldly feminine presence there, too, present in the lives of both the main character and his fictional creator. This incredible story about a Russian émigré is set in Nazi Germany. So, what is one to make of all that? Grayson address Nabokov’s affair soberly and with clinical precision and artful brevity. Certain things have been obfuscated, which is inevitable. In the aftermath of fame Nabokov, aided by diligent Nabokovians, carefully constructed a public myth of his past, and his family life withstood a great deal of curiosity and was seen as impermeable, impenetrable. That was until some archival materials came to light, and they almost always do eventually, including some letters. Of course, it is one thing to look at them as private facts, and another to look at Nabokov in light of some of the revelations and personal testimonies. All I can tell you is that when I came to this country 23 years ago and, as a young poet, actively took part in Russian émigré cultural life, I met intellectuals and writers of the first and second waves of immigration who had known Nabokov… The kinds of responses they had to him as a man made me very uncomfortable because I had idealised him from the life inferred from his art. People said he was unkind, unfriendly, haughty… these are things that may or may not become subjects of further investigation. All in all, I would predict that there is going to be a revisionist Nabokov biography. Not by me, I assure you, I have my own literary garden to tend at this point! But, in a way, as regards Nabokov’s life, my Pnin , my Glory and my stories are enough for me… Maxim D. Shrayer’s answers copyright 2010 © by Maxim D. Shrayer"

"This is the first and to date only such monumental biography of Grossman. John and Carol Garrard remain the best informed and most dedicated students of his life and work. It’s to them that both the academic field and the general readership owe much of what we know about Grossman in the West. The book was recently reissued, and the original title was The Bones of Berdichev . Berdichev was Grossman’s hometown in Ukraine, and the place where his mother was murdered along with about 20,000 other Jews in September 1941. If one were to suggest a single biography that you can read sweepingly in one sitting – it’s un-put-downable in many ways – this would be it. Absolutely. Known as the “Jerusalem of Volhynia,” Berdichev was a major centre of Jewish learning and publishing, and Grossman grew up there in a family of Jewish-Russian intelligentsia. His father was a chemical engineer, his mother a teacher of French. At home he was not exposed either to Yiddish or to Judaic traditions in a systematic way. By the standards of that time and place, he came from the crème de la crème of the acculturated Jewish-Russian intelligentsia. Grossman was born in 1905, so he came of age at the time of the Russian revolutions and the Civil War. A revolutionary-minded youth, Grossman eventually ended up studying at Moscow University, graduating in chemistry. This is a fairly standard path, which, incidentally, happened to all four of my grandparents – young Jewish people coming out of the former Pale of Settlement, flocking to large cities after the revolution and especially going into engineering or the sciences. He first began as a writer of fiction, debuting in the 1930s with short stories and then with novels which are quite formulaic – one about miners, one about a working class lad’s path to Bolshevism. What is, perhaps, unique about his early work is you already see the imperative to represent the Jewish condition, and to show Jewish life. Then soon after the Nazi invasion in 1941 Grossman volunteered and become a military reporter for the main newspaper of the Red Army, Red Star or Krasnaya Zvezda. He was dispatched to cover the disastrous early months of the war, contributed journalistic pieces and also wrote his first novel, The People Are Immortal , which still reads breathlessly – although very Soviet in many ways, it describes the break of a Red Army unit out of enemy encirclement. Grossman’s first moment of great fame and national acclaim is Stalingrad. He covers Stalingrad from the autumn of 1942 up to the final stages of the battle, when he is reassigned, and publishes 13 essays, “The Direction of Main Strike” among them, which become nationally famous, printed and reprinted."

"By 1943 Grossman was already one of the best known writer-journalists in the Soviet Union, alongside Ilya Ehrenburg, the principal architect of popular resistance to the Nazis. In the summer of 1943, the Soviet troops began a liberation of previously occupied Soviet territories along a broad swathe of land, particularly in Ukraine. It’s also the area where much of the Shoah by bullet had been conducted, and it was soaked in blood. This was when Grossman began to feel that his imperative was not just to cover the war, but also to cover the Shoah. He wrote a short story called “The Old Teacher,” a fictional account of the murder of the entire Jewish population of a small town in Ukraine or Southern Russia. It was published in 1943. What is amazing is that he wrote it before personally witnessing the aftermath of the Shoah. In 1944 he joined Ilya Ehrenburg as the second editor of The Black Book , a project which was put together under the aegis of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. The full title is The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout Temporary Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland During the War of 1941-1945 . When Ehrenburg resigned in April 1944, Grossman remained as the editor and he also contributed original materials, but by 1947 the book had been derailed and it was never published in the Soviet Union."

"The Road is a very useful retrospective of Grossman’s shorter work, both fiction and non-fiction, which Robert Chandler – now the principal English-language interpreter of Grossman, and a gifted translator – put together with his colleagues. It attempts to create an arc going back to the beginnings of Grossman’s career as a writer, when he was still trying to gain his literary voice, all the way to his late short stories of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s very interesting if one wants to get a sense of his gradual transformation from a gifted yet formulaic Soviet writer of the 1930s to an original author, witness and political philosopher. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The collection is organised both chronologically and thematically, and the central part includes the 1943 story I mentioned, “The Old Teacher.” It also contains “The Hell of Treblinka,” his literary treatment of the legacy of the Treblinka death camp, originally published in 1944 – which was arguably the first published prose literary treatment of a concentration camp based on eyewitness accounts and whatever information Grossman could have gathered by himself. That essay is in some ways the cornerstone of his work, and one I have the highest regard for. Yes. It was produced as a brochure and distributed at the 1946 Nuremberg tribunal as part of the evidence presented by the Soviet side. I find this poignant because it was both a documentary work and a highly sophisticated literary work, which attests to the early significance of literary witnessing in disseminating the knowledge about the Shoah."

"Life and Fate is a novel that simultaneously attempts a panoramic presentation of the war and the Shoah. Its two main currents are Stalingrad and the Shoah, and against that double backdrop Grossman situates the dilemmas and anxieties of a talented Jewish physicist working on the Soviet nuclear programme. It is “panoramic” both in the best sense, and in the kind of sense that I think some readers get tired of. Think of boys and girls who read War and Peace , some girls skipping the war, some boys skipping the peace scenes – or of Henry James’s comment about [19th century novels as] “loose and baggy monsters.” But it’s the first novel to come out of the 1940s and ‘50s that attempts a comparative indictment of Hitlerism and Stalinism, the two varieties of totalitarianism that Grossman knew too well. I think some of Grossman’s more passionate advocates might do him disservice by miscontextualising his significance as an artist. When he’s called “the Tolstoy of the USSR” – Martin Amis’s expression – I think it confuses both obvious matters of Russian cultural history, and obvious matters of the history of the novel. I think Grossman should be appreciated on his own terms and with some of his longer works’ structural shortcomings. And there are parts of Life and Fate that lack what great novels like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Flaubert’s Madame Bovary naturally gain their momentum from – a tension of desire. But Life and Fate and subsequently Forever Flowing are the whales on which Grossman’s literary reputation rests."

"Forever Flowing , one of his late works and one of my favourites, is a short novel of which we have two English translations, Whitney’s and Chandler’s – both very different in their flavour and in what they emphasize. It’s the story of a Gulag victim’s return into the mainstream, and his realisation of being utterly out of place. He has moved so far along in his intellectual and ethical development that trying to adjust to Soviet life during the [post-Stalin] Thaw is of no interest to him. One of the narratives in Forever Flowing – the section dealing with the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s, during the collectivisation of agriculture – is just incredible in how Grossman was able to get inside the head of the characters. That story is just bloodstopping in its power. I wish I could think of a non-Jewish writer who would write of the Jews with such power and great empathy as Grossman, a Jew, wrote about the non-Jews, Ukrainians in this case. It’s a story that is really without any parallel. Grossman, having concluded Life and Fate , was hoping to have it published in the Soviet Union, rather than attempting to send it abroad clandestinely, as dissident writers would do in the decades to come. But the KGB seized most of the manuscripts, and Grossman was told by Mikhail Suslov – the party’s Central Committee’s secretary for ideology – that his novel would never be published, that it was more anti-Soviet than Doctor Zhivago . Of course, Suslov was correct in a morbidly ironic way. How Grossman ever thought this book would be published in the Soviet Union is to me a paradox which attests either to his naivety or to his saintliness – or both. Grossman’s latter years were disastrous. He had a hard time making a living. He told a writer friend that “they” had “strangled him in the back-alley.” “They” refers to the Soviet establishment but also the Soviet literary brethren who betrayed him – to the whole system. He died of cancer in 1964, surrounded by a tiny circle of dedicated family and friends. So it’s a very sad story, which has a happy afterlife. Grossman has survived very well in translation – as opposed to such Jewish bicultural literary geniuses as Isaac Babel, who are generally very hard to translate into English, just as Bernard Malamud would be hard to translate into Russian. I think his enduring legacy is of a once passionate advocate of the Soviet system who began with the belief that all people are beholden to the revolution, and who was then transformed by the war and the Shoah into a writer of Promethean vision with a mission to bear witness to what he was seeing – and a political philosopher to rival the other political philosophers of his time. I think that’s a powerful legacy. Maxim D. Shrayer’s answers copyright 2013 © by Maxim D Shrayer"