The European Nabokov Web, Classicism and T.S. Eliot

Robin Davies here demonstrates that Nabokov’s Pale Fire has a classical unity and represents a direct attack on T.S. Eliot’s philosophical position, particularly as given in The Waste Land and as represented by Eliot’s later tendency for conservatism in literature, politics, and religion. After Nabokov was forced into exile from Germany and then France in the 1930s with his young son and Jewish wife, Eliot’s passivism must have seemed to him the very antithesis of survival. The enigmatic Pale Fire and its surface triviality suggested that there could be self-consistent logic within the obvious commentary of Charles Kinbote and John Shade’s poem. Davies places this work in its vast European context, forming a bridge between Russian and European literature which will be appreciated by scholars of both.

Robin Davies (D.Phil, Oxford University) is a senior research associate at Cardiff University. He has long studied Nabokov’s literature.

Lazar Fleishman, Stanford University:
“The European Nabokov Web, Classicism and Eliot is a very fine book by a person of great talent and expertise both in the humanities and sciences, a kind of work that Nabokov himself would love to read, a kind of commentary to Pale Fire, which goes to the very heart of Nabokov's view of what literature is about.”