His travels over the years took him from the Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon to Utah, Colorado and Oregon. He was a passionate lepidopterist who wrote the definitive scholarly study of the genus Lycaeides and had several species named after him, such as Nabokov’s wood nymph. Nabokov went west because he was chasing butterflies. It took a Russian-born writer to awaken us to what Mark Twain knew: America is not a place it is a road. He saw more of the United States than did Fitzgerald, Kerouac or Steinbeck, and what he saw was back-roads America: personal, intimate, ticky-tack and yet undeniably authentic. Measured by the sheer number of miles covered, Nabokov is the most American of authors.
The wonder is that Nabokov survived at all. In other words, at the height of the Cold War, an expatriate Russian novelist with the resonant name of Vladimir was roaming through the reddest of red states, researching a book about a jaded aristocrat’s sexual obsession with “nymphets” (a coinage the book put in the Oxford English Dictionary).
Nabokov wrote his disturbingly compelling classic, “ Lolita,” over the course of five breathless years, from 1948 to 1953, filling 5-by-7 cards with notes he took riding shotgun while his designated driver, his wife, Véra, drove their black Oldsmobile from Ithaca, N.Y., to Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. I used to say that I felt like Humbert Humbert, the notoriously unreliable narrator of “Lolita,” who made a similar trip, but instead of traveling with a precocious preteen girl, I was traveling with a wife and a dewy-eyed dog.īut then I learned that Vladimir Nabokov himself had done the same thing. For the last 15 years my wife, Sarah, and I have driven every summer with our golden retriever from New Jersey to the Northern Rockies.
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