Vladimir Nabokov: Overlook Illustrated Lives

These days, biographies seem to be reaching new extremes at both ends of the "length spectrum." At the long end we have all those exhaustive multi-volume essays on political figures and the literary life; at the short end has stood the compact line of Penguin Brief Lives books that cover everyone from Saint Augustine to Elvis Presley.Now comes Overlook Press with the second entry in its Overlook Brief Lives series --- thin volumes loaded with pictures and text not much longer than an ambitious New Yorker profile. The first of these dealt with Samuel Beckett. Now comes a similar effort, devoted to Vladimir Nabokov and written by Jane Grayson, a British academic and Nabokov specialist.Nabokov, who died in 1977 at the age of 78, makes a fascinating subject. Most general readers remember him best as the author of LOLITA, that literary sensation of the late 1950s whose title has become a lower-case noun in our dictionaries. But Nabokov also wrote several other estimable novels too, in addition to many short stories, poems, essays, translations and literary criticism (much of it in The New Yorker). He was also an expert on butterflies, a master chess player, the constructor of the first Russian crossword puzzle and the translator of ALICE IN WONDERLAND into Russian.He inherited a fortune and a vast estate at the age of 17, but was forced to leave Russia because of his father's political activities at the time of the 1917 revolution. He matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge (England) and lived and wrote in Germany until the advent of Hitler. This forced him to seek a livelihood in the U.S., where he practically had to start his life over again --- both personally and professionally.LOLITA was published in Paris in 1955 but was greeted "in silence," until Graham Greene singled it out for high praise in a London newspaper. Publication in America three years later gained Nabokov instant notoriety on this side of the Atlantic. His tale of sexual predator ...was condemned as highfalutin pornography. I was so they did not print it.Nabokov returned to Europe in 1958 and lived out his life in Switzerland. The biggest event during this time was a sulfurous literary feud with Edmund Wilson, who had been a close friend during his years in America.Jane Grayson covers all of this ground quickly and efficiently in this short biography. Understandably there is little development of themes or in-depth literary criticism here, but the basic facts are laid out concisely. She stresses Nabokov's aloofness from political action and his butterfly-like agility in crossing borders between languages, literary styles and nations alike. Her own style is eminently readable and obvious errors are few (she places the rise of McCarthyism in the "late 1940s" although it did not begin until 1950 and a picture caption tells us that Boris Pasternak was "pressurized" into refusing the Nobel Prize for Literature). The pictures are mostly interesting, though there are a few that are on