RL 58 — Vladimir Nabokov: Exile Between Russian and English

Vladimir Nabokov: Exile Between Russian and English

A writer can leave a country without leaving its language. The harder departure may come when the people who understand that language are no longer the readers he can reach. 

For Nabokov, writing across Russian and English changed who could hear the world inside a sentence.

1. A Writer Between Languages

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) knew the comfort of a familiar language in unfamiliar surroundings. Russian remained available to him long after returning to Russia had become impossible. He could remember its voices, write its sentences and argue with its literary traditions while living elsewhere.

His move into English brought another difficulty. A writer needs readers who can hear a joke, recognize an allusion or understand why an ordinary word carries an ache. Changing languages meant reconsidering that relationship.

The novels discussed here follow people trying to live with similar gaps: between a remembered home and a rented room, between intellectual ability and awkward speech or between an inherited culture and the life still ahead.

2. Russian Literature Beyond Russia

Nabokov grew up with Russian, English and French rather than discovering English after migration. His family left Russia in 1919 following revolution and civil war. After studying at Cambridge, he lived in Berlin and later France among émigrés whose cultural lives continued beyond their country’s borders.

Writing as V. Sirin, he established himself within this displaced readership. Russian newspapers, journals and publishing houses sustained a community of writers and readers abroad. Russian literature remained a living exchange rather than a collection of books rescued from the past.

A Russian publication offered more than reassurance. It brought a new poem to discuss, an author to dislike or a review to argue about. He had readers and rivals even without access to his homeland. His early career grew within those exchanges.

Yet the country remembered by these readers kept slipping further into the past. They could preserve familiar turns of phrase while losing touch with the places where those phrases had once sounded ordinary.

3. Mary: The Distance Between a Woman and a Memory

In Mary (1926), originally published in Russian as Mashenka, Lev Ganin lives in a Berlin boardinghouse among other Russian émigrés. He discovers that a fellow boarder’s wife is the woman he loved in Russia. Her expected arrival turns a settled memory into an immediate possibility.

The boardinghouse gives exile a cramped and unglamorous address. Against its temporary rooms, Ganin’s remembered youth feels warm and almost within reach. Anyone who has made an unhappy present bearable by remembering a happier place can recognize the temptation.

Ganin’s longing reaches beyond Mary herself. She belongs to a time when desire seemed inseparable from familiar landscapes and a recognizable future. Recovering her appears to promise the recovery of that earlier self.

The difficulty is that Mary has continued living outside his recollections. His private image cannot account for all the years between their first relationship and the anticipated reunion. Near the end, Ganin abandons the planned meeting. The imagined return has reached a limit that an actual encounter cannot resolve.

Mary cannot give him back the person he was. His departure leaves the future uncertain yet frees it from the demand that everything begin again exactly as before.

4. The Gift: Belonging Through Argument

The Gift appeared in Russian serialization in 1937–1938 before its first complete book edition was published in 1952. Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, its central figure, is a young Russian writer living in Berlin. His artistic development grows through poetry, recollections of his father, literary disputes and his relationship with Zina.

For Fyodor, Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) belongs to a tradition he can enter through language despite geographical separation. The imaginative presence of Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) also helps make Russian literary culture available beyond Russia. The lost country remains connected to books through which an aspiring writer can test his own abilities.

However, inherited literature brings disagreements along with reassurance. Fyodor’s provocative treatment of Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889) questions the authority of a revered cultural figure. His creative independence develops through a willingness to dispute what other members of his community value.

Fyodor’s arguments make this literary world feel lived in. He can love Russian literature without accepting every judgment made in its name. That freedom matters to a young writer trying to find his own voice.

Placed beside Mary, The Gift reveals another response to displacement. Ganin looks toward an earlier life while Fyodor tries to create work that has not yet existed. Both face the absence of Russia yet their novels give that absence different consequences.

5. Writing in English Before America

Nabokov wrote The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), his first English-language novel, in Paris during 1938–1939. He moved to the United States in 1940. The decision to write an English novel therefore preceded the American setting usually associated with his later career.

Its narrator, identified as V., investigates the life of his deceased half-brother, an English-language novelist. He consults people who knew Sebastian and considers the competing stories surrounding him. The investigation steadily complicates the promise contained in the title: a life may be described without becoming fully accessible.

V. wants the scattered evidence to bring his brother closer. Instead, every conversation leaves something unresolved. Knowing the facts of a life does not necessarily mean knowing how that life felt from within.

Read alongside the author’s change of language, the search takes on another resonance. Both reader and narrator must enter a world whose familiar signs they cannot fully trust. This is a connection between the novel and its circumstances rather than a claim that its characters are disguised portraits of their creator.

English also changed the practical work of addressing readers. References carried easily within a Russian literary community could require different handling before a new audience. The transition involved decisions about explanation, rhythm and cultural familiarity as much as vocabulary.

His English career began while he was still displaced in Europe. The familiar story of an immigrant finding success in America leaves out that unsettled beginning.

Writing in English also offered a way to reach more readers at an uncertain time. His Russian audience abroad was small and Europe’s political upheavals made its future increasingly precarious. The rise of Nazism endangered his family, especially his Jewish wife, Véra Nabokov (1902–1991). These circumstances belong alongside the artistic choices behind his turn to English. No single reason fully explains that change.

His later English fiction reached a much wider audience with Lolita (1955), whose treatment of obsession, power and narrative manipulation is discussed in our separate review.

6. Pnin: What an Accent Cannot Tell You

Pnin (1957) begins with an ordinary difficulty: a Russian professor in America has taken the wrong train. Timofey Pnin struggles with English, arrangements and expectations that others navigate more easily. The reader first encounters him through situations that make his vulnerability visible.

These difficulties create comedy while raising a less comfortable question about judgment. Pnin’s knowledge does not disappear because his pronunciation sounds unusual. Nevertheless, the language through which colleagues hear him can obscure the intelligence and experience behind his speech.

The novel gradually changes the weight of that comedy. Pnin remembers Mira, his Jewish former love who was murdered during the Holocaust. The people around him notice his awkwardness without realizing how much he has lost.

After learning this, we hear the comedy differently. The man who misses a train has also survived losses that his colleagues may never understand. His awkwardness is visible immediately. His grief requires someone to pay attention.

Pnin also prevents us from treating every displaced character as an image of Nabokov himself. His linguistic insecurity contrasts with his creator’s extraordinary English. The novel reminds us that an exile’s imperfect English says little about his intelligence or character.

7. Translation and the Work of Cultural Explanation

Nabokov’s work in literary translation complicates the idea that his Russian and English careers occupied separate compartments. He collaborated with translators and revised English versions of earlier Russian novels. Readers encountering these books in English were sometimes encountering an author’s later decisions alongside his earlier writing.

Translation makes small differences difficult to ignore. A familiar reference may puzzle new readers while a joke may fall flat in another language. Revisiting his own fiction allowed Nabokov to consider whether preserving an effect required altering its original means.

His translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, published with extensive commentary in 1964, established a different priority. He favored close fidelity to meaning over reproducing the original rhyme scheme. His notes explained details that even a smooth English translation could not fully convey. English to suggest that nothing had been lost.

His approach also divided readers. The translation helped them follow Pushkin’s meaning yet offered less of the rhyme and rhythm that made the Russian verse such a pleasure to read. Some valued that precision. Others felt too much of the poetry had slipped away. The disagreement reveals a difficulty every translator of poetry faces: preserving what a poem says while finding a way to convey how it sounds and feels.

The contrast helps explain why translation was an ongoing argument for him. Revising his own fiction allowed freedoms he approached differently when translating another writer. Readers of the English novels should therefore notice the translator’s credit and the edition: these details help explain the book in their hands.

8. Self-Translation: Returning Without Going Home

Speak, Memory offers a revealing case because its account of a life traveled between languages. The memoir appeared in English in 1951, titled Conclusive Evidence in the United States and Speak, Memory in Britain. The revised Russian Drugie berega (Other Shores) followed in 1954. An expanded English version appeared in 1966.

Returning to Russian meant revisiting scenes he had already described in English. He knew the rooms and faces yet the sentences through which he approached them had changed. The later English version carried traces of that return.

A childhood detail might need explaining to one audience while another would recognize it immediately. Each version required fresh choices about what to name, explain or leave unsaid. Translation became another stage of writing the memoir.

The remembered country also has boundaries. This is the childhood of a boy raised in considerable privilege. Its beauty deserves attention without being mistaken for the experience of everyone who lived in Russia.

9. Finding a Place in Another Language

In these books, exile enters through things a person might encounter on an ordinary day: a boardinghouse room, an argument about a writer or a sentence that comes out wrong. Behind each small incident lies the difficulty of making a life where familiar surroundings can no longer be taken for granted.

Ganin must loosen his hold on a remembered love. Fyodor needs room to write within a tradition he can also challenge. Pnin deserves to be heard beyond his accent. Their experiences give displacement different faces.

His journey between languages also widened the reach of Russian literature. Readers could encounter displaced Russian lives through his English fiction and discover his earlier novels in translation. Writing for a new audience gave him fresh possibilities without ending his conversation with the literature he had grown up reading. That continuing exchange helps explain why his work belongs to both Russian and English literary history.

Writing in English brought Nabokov new readers without closing his relationship with Russian. His books invite us to follow that continuing conversation and to notice what it costs a person to become understandable in another world.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Did Nabokov learn English after leaving Russia?

No. He grew up with English alongside Russian and French. His later transition involved choosing English as his principal language for fiction rather than learning it from the beginning.

Which novel did Nabokov write first in English?

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was his first English-language novel. He wrote it in Paris during 1938–1939. It appeared in 1941 after his move to the United States.

Which novels best illuminate his treatment of exile?

Mary examines longing for a vanished personal world. The Gift explores artistic belonging within Russian émigré culture. Pnin considers the practical vulnerability and hidden history of a displaced scholar in America.

Did he translate all his Russian novels himself?

No. Several English versions involved collaborators whose contributions should be acknowledged. Nabokov’s substantial revisions also make it useful to check which translation and edition a reader is using.

Why does his English writing still belong in a Russian literature series?

His English fiction continues to engage with Russian literary inheritance and the experiences of displaced Russian people. Reading across languages helps us follow those connections without assuming that every book expresses one national identity.

References

1. Nabokov, Vladimir, Mary, trans. Michael Glenny in collaboration with the author (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).

2. Nabokov, Vladimir, The Gift, trans. Michael Scammell with the collaboration of the author (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).

3. Nabokov, Vladimir, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).

4. Nabokov, Vladimir, Pnin (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).

5. Nabokov, Vladimir, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).

6. Pushkin, Aleksandr, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. with commentary by Vladimir Nabokov, rev. edn, 4 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).

7. Boyd, Brian, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

8. Grayson, Jane, Nabokov Translated: A Comparison of Nabokov’s Russian and English Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).