Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov appears not through direct action but as a point of literary and social comparison. The émigrés around Eduard resent his departure from their world; Eduard shares their dislike while rejecting the reasons behind it; and the narrator’s early worship of Nabokov affects how he reads Eduard. Across these distinct responses, Nabokov represents both an authority in Russian letters and a standard against which other writers measure themselves.

Nabokov and the émigré world

At the newspaper Novoye russkoye slovo, the émigré workplace offers Eduard warmth and reassurance: coffee, sweet tea, vodka, pickled cucumbers, birthday gatherings, and an affectionate formality in which colleagues call him Eduard Venyaminovich. Yet the same atmosphere resembles an old folks’ home. Its inhabitants have grown mired in nostalgia, quarrels, and hopes of returning to Russia. Their shared grievance is Nabokov—not chiefly because Lolita shocks them, but because he stopped writing émigré novels for émigrés and turned away from their enclosed literary world.

The resentment makes Nabokov a figure in the community’s argument about whom literature should serve. The émigrés’ complaint is not simply about a novel or its subject: they feel abandoned by a writer who ceased addressing their group. The book places that grievance inside a vividly cozy setting, making the warmth of the office inseparable from the sense of cultural enclosure that Eduard fears.

Eduard’s opposition and Smakov’s judgment

Eduard dislikes Nabokov too, but from a different position. His dislike is bound up with class hatred and disdain for what he regards as literary literature; he does not want to share the émigrés’ reasons or remain hemmed in by their world, with its walls smelling of tombs and cat urine. Nabokov therefore marks a distinction Eduard wants to preserve: agreement in dislike does not mean belonging to the same social or artistic camp.

Later, when Eduard entrusts Gennady Smakov with the manuscript of It’s Me, Eddie, Smakov praises the book as genuinely modern while placing Nabokov among the great artists of an older order. In Smakov’s account, Nabokov’s standing as an artist coexists with the image of a university professor and a stuffy poet; Eduard’s writing, by contrast, carries the charge of the contemporary. This comparison is Smakov’s assessment, not an objective verdict on Nabokov, and it reveals how the characters use literary reputations to define what counts as modern.

The narrator’s reading of Eduard

The narrator recalls growing up worshipping Nabokov. That allegiance initially makes it difficult to appreciate Eduard’s straightforward, unadorned prose, which seems lax beside the style the narrator had learned to admire. But Eduard’s life and energy affect him more powerfully than the manner of the writing. Reading about that life does not inspire him: it intensifies his depression and self-hatred, as he imagines himself condemned to the role of a bitter walk-on while Eduard appears both an adventurer and a published writer.

Nabokov’s importance here is thus partly structural. He supplies the narrator with an inherited literary standard, but the encounter with Eduard shifts attention from stylistic allegiance to the force of a lived story. The contrast does not erase the narrator’s admiration for Nabokov; it shows how that admiration shapes, and at first limits, his perception of a writer whose life seems impossibly more vivid than his own.