Nabokov Carries on Father's Legacy

Always an adventurer, Dmitri Nabokov ’55 accelerated out of Harvard Yard on Commencement Day 50 years ago to embark upon a career studded with a colorful confetti of activity.

His post-graduate path has found him poised behind the wheel of Ferraris and performing operas beside Pavarotti in Milan. He even served a stint in the U.S. Army.

Now that he’s 71, Nabokov, the only son of literary legend Vladimir, is being filmed for Russian television. The crew wants to shoot one of his race cars, perhaps a boat, and to ask him more than 30 questions composed in advance.

While Dmitri seems to have broken into the spotlight, there was once a time when he lived in his father’s shadow.

Since the publication of Vladmir’s famed “Lolita” in 1955, Nabokov has served as executor of his father’s literary estate and as unofficial spokesman for the late author, who also wrote “Pale Fire” and the autobiographical “Speak, Memory.”

More than a custodian of his father’s works, Nabokov has become a jet-setter on his own, splitting his time between Palm Beach and Montreux, Switzerland. Like his father, he plays the prima donna to the media, insisting on interviewing through e-mail with The Crimson and crafting answers in advance for Russian television.

Those who know him describe him as tall and imposing, with a face like his father’s, and one editor calls him “his father’s very best translator.” But Dmitri has accrued a set of accolades and interests all his own.

“His love of fast boats and fast cars and helicopter skiing made him like a James Bond figure,” says Deanne Urmy, editor of “Nabokov’s Butterflies,” a collection of Vladimir’s writings which includes translations by Nabokov.

COLLEGE DAYS

Nabokov entered Harvard College at age 17—the age he’d like to revert to now, he jokes—and made his own name quickly, starting with the compulsory expository writing program for freshmen. Instead of requiring Nabokov to compose the usual exercises, the instructor let Nabokov write whatever he wanted.

Nabokov went on to concentrate in History and Literature and to live in Lowell House with his older cousin Ivan, who claimed that Nabokov’s priorities in college had been “1) mountain climbing, 2) girls, 3) track, 4) music and 5) my other studies,” Nabokov writes. His entryway, M, also housed the Harvard Mountaineering Club’s office, where Nabokov would spend hours poring over books about faraway peaks and sipping vermouth.

Though he summited a few peaks with his fellow club members, his most memorable excursion was a climb up the sides of Memorial Hall one night. It was the closest he would ever get to the course his father taught on Don Quixote, he jokes.

His father was teaching at Harvard in 1952, which meant that Nabokov could collapse after track practice at his parents’ home to munch on his mother’s blini.

But as he ate, his father would nag Nabokov about his lack of progress on his first professional translation. “A long-suffering, occasionally snow-sprinkled copy of the Russian book sometimes lay for days on the seat of my permanently topless MG-TC,” Nabokov writes, referring to his classic roadster. “Father, when he happened upon the car parked on a nearby street, would meticulously record the page to which the book was opened, and confront me in the evening with my lamentable lack of progress.”

The translation turned out to be a success, eventually finding its way onto syllabi in universities across the country. But the shock waves that his father would send into the literary world three years later had not yet appeared on the radar. “I was still living in a kind of adolescent haze,” Nabokov writes, “unaware of...the full impact that my father’s presence had here, or would have upon world literature.”

PRIMA DONNA

Commencement was beckoning, and with a family fortune to back him, Nabokov had the luxury to dabble in everything from medicine to aeronautical science to psychology. At the time, law called most loudly, and when Nabokov earned a top score on his LSAT, Harvard Law School sent him an acceptance letter.

Still an undergrad, Nabokov thought through his options. “While the performer in me was sometimes tempted by a leading role in courtroom drama, the idealism I still harbored made me less and less sanguine about the profession’s prospects,” he writes.

So, instead, Nabokov bowed to his performer’s personality and started taking voice lessons. After graduation he entered the nearby Longy School of Music to study opera.

After two years, Nabokov briefly joined the U.S. Army, where he was an instructor of military Russian and the chaplain’s assistant, whose duties included playing tennis and singing in the choir.

But the sounds of the opera still rang in his ears, so he followed his longing to Italy, where he hoped to break onto the stage by entering singing competitions. He won the bass category of one contest and went on to make his debut in Milan in a production of La Boheme alongside the now legendary Luciano Pavarotti.

On the side, Nabokov raced cars professionally. “The racing was his passion,” remembers Anne W. Elvins ’59, a former opera singer who used to host him at her Milan home.

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

Yet Nabokov’s professional racing career came to a halt after a chance incident in Italy, when he asked a tenor and his wife if he could keep his car in their yard the night before a race at a nearby track. Come morning, the couple told him that he could take back his car—but only if he would abandon racing to devote himself entirely to opera.

He agreed. Nabokov had explored everything: academia and the racetrack, the opera house and mountains. But he still had his father’s literary legacy to surmount.

Nabokov wouldn’t have given up professional racing, he writes, if he had not recognized his enthusiasm for upholding his literary roots. “My greatest responsibility and greatest talent now lies in the preservation of my father’s literary heritage, to which I have devoted my remaining years,” he writes.

On an amateur level, he still races “several Ferraris, my handful of Dodge Vipers, and other occasional exotics.” But that pricey car collection is just his favorites; Nabokov has never been strapped for cash. “He was accustomed to moving in high circles,” Elvins, the former opera singer, says. “He was elegant and he demanded elegance in his lady friends.”

Unlike his father, whose marriage with Vera was legendary, Nabokov never married. “I have been enormously fond of women,” writes Nabokov, “and that fondness perhaps blinded me in making my choices and decisions, until it was too late to embark on a traditional ménage.”

Without a son, Nabokov now dotes on his father’s memory, recently playing the renowned author on stage at a celebration of his father’s centennial at Cornell. “I was bathed in the thrilling aura of ‘becoming’ my father for a spell,” he writes.

After forays into the spheres of law, opera, and racing, Nabokov was finally drawn back to the bewitching allure of his father’s literary legacy.

—Staff writer April H. N. Yee can be reached at aprilyee@fas.harvard.edu.