His Father’s Son : Dmitri Nabokov Is the Sole Heir to a Luminous Literary Legacy

Greatness of name in the father oft-times overwhelms the son. They stand too near one another .

--Ben Jonson

In a chic Manhattan hotel room, high above the greenery of Central Park, Dmitri Nabokov welcomes a visitor, pours a round of drinks and braces himself for a question he has been asked many, many times:

“What is it like being the son of Vladimir Nabokov?”

It had been an exhausting day of interviews for the 55-year-old son, whose late father was one of the premier writers of the 20th Century. Dmitri recently has edited a volume of Nabokov’s letters and was in town to promote the book before jetting back to his Palm Beach, Fla., home.

A tall, broad-shouldered man who bears a striking resemblance to his father, he listens carefully to the question, then fishes out a neatly typed manuscript from a pile of papers on the floor. Snapping to attention in his seat, he clears his voice.

“I have an answer for that, and I’d much rather read it, for precision sake,” Nabokov says crisply. “It’s better this way.”

What follows is a paean to Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian-born author who fled the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany before coming to America in 1940. By the time of his death in 1977, on the strength of masterpieces like “Lolita,” “Ada” and “Pale Fire,” he was widely viewed as a creative genius.

Dmitri, born in Germany but raised in America, is the author’s only child.

“It was a very rich relationship,” the son begins reading. “We were very good friends. We spoke with utmost openness about many things. . . . He made my life infinitely richer, more entertaining and equipped me for creative endeavors of my own. Now, I’m working on a novel.

“Although I may not always be a Boy Scout, the conscience, as a subliminal image of how Father would have acted or reacted in a given situation, is ever-present,” he continues. “A kind of alarm goes off at the thought of behaving in a coarse or less than honorable manner.”

Dmitri’s answer takes up two pages.

But suddenly the similarities between father and son seem more than visual. Nabokov the elder often demanded control over interviews, asking that journalists submit questions in advance and print his typewritten responses verbatim. Like his father, Dmitri also has submitted questions to reporters, but does not insist that they be used.

There are other parallels: Sounding very much like his brilliant but irascible father, Dmitri voices contempt for critics who view Nabokov as an arrogant man. In another echo, the son curtly dismisses those academics who he says have “distorted” and “twisted” the meaning of Nabokov’s works.

Indeed, Dmitri seems to “out-Nabokov Nabokov,” as one book critic has put it. But to hear the son tell it, that is the last thing on his mind.

“I have no complexes,” he says firmly. “I’m not trying either to equal my father, to live up to him, to be better.”

Leaning forward, Dmitri notes that he is a respected opera singer, an essayist and a proven sports car driver. He was educated at Harvard and studied singing in New York, Italy and Cambridge. Today, he is hard at work on a novel that bears “no resemblance” to his father’s style.

“I’m in my dimension, I try to do the best I can,” he says.

But Vladimir casts a long shadow, and who could blame Dmitri for feeling just a little bit pressured? How easy is it being the son of a writer whose breathtaking prose was all the more amazing because English was not his native language? Although he exudes confidence, Nabokov the younger says he will write his novel under a pseudonym, “to avoid undeserved fame or blame.”

“Whatever I do, whatever I translate, I feel that in a good sense he (Vladimir) is peeking over my shoulder and saying ‘Uh-uh!’ if I use an awkward locution . . . or a sentimental phrase.”

Meanwhile, Dmitri is the chief executor of his father’s literary estate, an often exhausting job. He supervises foreign translations, new English editions and forthcoming volumes of Nabokov’s notebooks. Along with his mother, Vera, he is helping a biographer prepare a two-volume study of his father.

“One has to make an agonizing choice sometimes,” says Dmitri, who also has homes in Montreux, Switzerland and Monza, Italy. “Will I devote the hours between 4 and 6 in the morning to my own book, or to checking an Italian translation? I think father would often have liked me to opt for my own book, and I’m doing that more and more.”

But in recent weeks, Dmitri’s attention has focused on the new edition of his father’s letters, which cover the period from 1940 to 1977. The book is a treasure trove of personal anecdotes, showing Nabokov deeply immersed in his work and pursuing a lifetime fascination with butterfly collecting.

On the lighter side, the letters reveal a fascinating exchange between Nabokov and Alfred Hitchcock over proposals for television thrillers, none of which were ever written. Seized by inspiration, the author composes a billboard jingle for the Burma Shave company. In a 1961 “safe sex” warning to his son, he writes: “In Italy, for his own good, a wolf must wear a riding hood.”

But other letters are more abrasive.

As Nabokov evolves from an author struggling for American recognition into a hugely successful novelist, he skewers critics, fellow writers, publishers, agents, illustrators and even autograph-seekers along the way:

* When a New York literary agent suggests that Nabokov would gain more readers if he wrote about contemporary or social issues, he responds tartly that “Human interest means Uncle Tom’s cabin to me (or Galsworthy’s drivel) and makes me sick, seasick.”

* Asked to do an occasional piece for the New York Times Book Review in 1949, Nabokov fires back a letter saying, “I have been wanting for a long time to take a crack at such big fakes as Mr. T. S. Eliot and Mr. Thomas Mann.”

* On another occasion, he complains that the illustration of a butterfly on the title page of his “Collected Poems” does not accurately portray the insect mentioned in the text and is “as meaningless in the present case as would be a picture of a tuna fish on the jacket of ‘Moby Dick.’ ”

By far, the most revealing letters deal with the author’s struggle to find a suitable publisher--and public acceptance--for “Lolita.”

The 1955 novel about a pederast’s obsession with a 12-year-old nymphet created a controversy when it first appeared. Some public officials called it obscene. Nabokov, who once considered burning the manuscript, was convinced that he had written his finest work.

In a 1956 letter to British writer Graham Greene, for example, he lamented that, “my poor Lolita is having a rough time. The pity is that if I had made her a boy, or a cow, or a bicycle, Philistines might never have flinched.”

Earlier, he wrote a Viking editor that “no court could prove (“Lolita”) to be lewd and libertine. . . . ‘Lolita’ is a tragedy. Pornography is an attitude and an intention. The tragic and the obscene exclude one another.”

When a New Yorker editor questioned the moral standing of “Lolita’s” main character, he replied: “How many are the memorable literary characters whom we would like our teen-age daughters to meet? Would you like our Patricia to go on a date with Othello? Would we like our Mary to read the New Testament temple against temple with Raskolnikov?”

Although Vladimir died 12 years ago, his son insists that he would have cast a similarly withering eye on politics and culture today. Asked about his father’s conservatism, Dmitri reads once again from a prepared text.

“I can tell you that Nabokov would have regarded those twins, glasnost and perestroika, with a salutary skepticism. For the boot is always ready to come down. And he would have seen in recent events in China an illustration of how it does.

“He would not have joined the merry throng of nostalgic visitors to Russia while even a single dissident is imprisoned in a mental hospital or a single adjective must be censored in his works.”

As the recitation continues, it is hard to tell where Nabokov’s caustic voice begins and his son’s reverential echo leaves off.

Still, Dmitri is sure he has found his own creative path.

After his father died, for example, he wrote a memoir to be included in a tribute to Vladimir, and “that was the first thing of my own that I was pleased with,” he says. “In a sense, he transmitted to me the most precious legacy of all that a dying father can transmit to a son, which is the gift of inspiration.

“He suddenly appeared in me, as if a baton had been passed. I’m not putting myself on the same level with him, but I was suddenly able to write stuff that I liked.”

Was Vladimir’s death necessary to liberate him? Dmitri dismisses the thought but sounds ambivalent when asked again how it feels to be Nabokov’s son.

“The most difficult question I have to face is when I get in an airplane and a nice, happy, single-minded businessman sits down next to me and says, ‘What do you sell? What’s your line?’

“How do I answer that nice man without offending him and without patronizing him?” he says with a laugh. “What do I sell?”