Queer, Queer Vladimir

When the BBC asked Vladimir Nabokov in 1968 what authors had influenced him most, he responded, “I'd much prefer to speak of the modern books I hate on first sight: the earnest case histories of minority groups, the sorrows of homosexuals, the anti-American Sovietnam sermon …” (Nabokov 1973, 116). With an uncharacteristic flourish of generalizing, Nabokov groups together what had by then become a familiar coupling of Cold-War villains: minorities, homosexuals, and communists. But what troubles Nabokov most is not the existence of various political interest groups—he makes much in Strong Opinions and Speak, Memory of his lack of interest in matters political—but that such interests are cast into fictive discourse: “case histories,” “sorrows” and “sermons” employ narratives that indulge and promote their authors. Like Alfred Kazin, ‘for whom the love that dared not speak its name’ in the nineteenth century “cannot, in the twentieth century, shut up” (quoted in Sklepowick 1977, 525), Nabokov signals his disdain for the narcissistic indulgence of homosexual and political narratives. Viewed through this lens, then, his 1962 Pale Fire would appear to be a parodic romp across the phobic landscape of Cold-War America, in that Charles Kinbote, the novel's exiled king and homosexual commentator, gives us precisely that earnest case history, and does so with a narcissistic self-promotion that reaches almost demonic proportions in Nabokov's hands.

Such a diagnosis of narcissism, at any rate, is made by Nabokov's critics: they find Charles Kinbote an “incurable pederast and lunatic,” a “narcissist and madman” whose “invulnerable egotism and megalomania” (Haegert 1984, 405, 415) characterize “a boringly tenacious pedant with homosexual urgencies” (Galef 1985, 427), and whose “rampant homosexuality, … mad egocentricity… [and] preposterous unreliability” (Boyd 1991, 426) refract and distort John Shade's poem, upon