Nabokov's Canon: From Onegin to Ada by Marijeta Bozovic (review)

This book rethinks Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor (1969) and annotated translation (1964) of Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1825–1832) as stages in the project to promote a canon rivaling that codified by Anglophone modernists and their heirs among the New Critics. In the 1960s, Bozovic argues, the newly famous writer attempted to redefine the legacy of transnational modernism in an alternative, continental and multi-lingual canon bringing together an array of Anglophone, Russian, and French authors and positing the Russian novel as a central element of the resultant transnational canon. In the Onegin commentary, Bozovic claims, Nabokov identified precursors to transnational modernism—Chateaubriand, Byron, and Pushkin. Ada continued the project, locating the next cohort of precursors (Flaubert, Dickens, Tolstoy) and outlining the canon of modernist writing proper, centered on Proust and Joyce, whose artistic legacy Nabokov deemed resistant to the test of time—a quality he also bestowed upon his own oeuvre, including himself in the canon as a natural heir to all those precursors and contemporaries, "rather than the outsider figure to any national tradition" (5).

Bozovic begins by surveying Pushkin's novel with an eye on perennial Russian anxiety about cultural centers and peripheries, especially when it comes to Russian literature's belatedness and the concomitant fear of unoriginality and marginality. She proceeds by examining Nabokov's exegesis of Eugene Onegin as a "masterpiece of appropriation and adaptation" and a "model for how to make new out of old, advanced out of belated, and central out of marginal" (12). The Onegin commentary constructs "an international romantic tradition as the precursor to [Nabokov's] particular style of modernism" (48), mitigating his obsessive (in Bozovic's view) concern with cultural provincialism, and providing Nabokov with a weapon "to wage his own cultural capital wars" (43). The study then turns to Ada as an allegory about literary canons whose amalgamation of national traditions—Russian, English, and French—levels the literary playing field for an émigré author threatened by cultural marginalization. For Bozovic, Ada's intertextuality subsumes the artistic legacies of Proust and Joyce, transformed here into signs visible to an elite community of readers-cum-carriers of superior cultural knowledge—a procedure reiterating the instrumentalization of Byron and Chateaubriand in Eugene Onegin, according to Nabokov's exegesis. Bozovic then addresses Ada's treatment of modernist attitudes toward time, venturing that Nabokov parodies rather than perpetuates these attitudes. The last point allows the scholar to claim that Ada "is not a late modernist monument at all but a novel about modernism" that "underscores the distance between its author and his literary precursors" (158).

In the coda to her study, Bozovic ventures that Nabokov's canon-formation project became his most important legacy for a number of writers inspired by his work—Azar Nafisi, Orhan Pamuk, J. M. Coetzee, and W. G. Sebald (165). These authors, Bozovic insists, saw in Nabokov's project emancipatory elements for their own self-fashioning as transnational writers. Unfortunately, she does not take this claim much farther, since the ensuing cursory survey of Nabokov's putative "children" lacks in analytical depth, appearing more as an afterthought to the main body of the monograph than its logical culmination.

Bozovic's thought-provoking take on Nabokov's late writings at the intersection of several literary and cultural studies fields will undoubtedly prod Nabokov scholars and lay readers alike to revisit their oft-dismissive attitudes toward the post–Pale Fire stage in the author's career. Hers is a productive and intellectually stimulating first step toward such a revision. But, as befits a pioneering study, it is also beset by unresolved methodological issues that are likely to keep busy all those who wish to push further Bozovic's inquiry.

To begin, the book provides little evidence that Ada and Nabokov's Pushkin scholarship were read by contemporaries as a challenge to the dominant literary canon. Since the study never ventures a description...