Nabokov in Black: Race, Taboo, and the Making of an American Writer

in preparation

The fiction of Vladimir Nabokov has been overwhelmingly understood in terms of its narrative contrivance, linguistic virtuosity, aesthetic play, and postmodern artifice — that is, as altogether uninterested in the social world, least of all issues of race, ethnicity, and justice. Nabokov in Black argues the contrary to reveal how the author’s English-language novels evince a deep and longstanding engagement with questions of racial identity and racial politics, especially through the trope of interracial romance. In Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), Pale Fire (1962), and Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), miscegenation becomes a metonym for the Cold War-era taboos most famously treated in these works: pedophilia, homosexuality, and incest.

The book further shows how Nabokov’s abiding interest in issues of race and ethnicity was largely grounded in his devotion to Russia’s national poet, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), who was of African descent. Nabokov in Black demonstrates how the novelist’s race-thinking developed across the three decades that he dedicated to his “unreadable” translation of and commentary on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1964-1975). Ultimately, it is through his work on Pushkin and subsequent fiction that Nabokov comes to understand his new American environment, his transition to English authorship, and his predicament as a refugee caught between place and language.