'Dark But Festive'

I grew up in the Age of Magazines. My parents, who were not book readers, subscribed at various times to Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, Time, Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post and National Geographic, not to mention those periodicals subscribed to by my mother (McCall’s, et al.) and my father (Field and Stream, et al.). Every adult I knew read magazines and newspapers, and so did I. 

The single issue I remember best because I saved it for years and because it changed my understanding of literature was Time magazine with the cover date May 23, 1969: Vladimir Nabokov, who had just turned seventy and published Ada (full title: Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle), his seventeenth and longest novel. I had read Lolita the previous summer and was hooked. The following year I was a university freshman and Nabokov was the only contemporary novelist I regularly bought in hardcover because I never had much money. Ada’s cover price: $8.95.

 

Brian Boyd, born in New Zealand three months before me, published his two-volume biography of Nabokov in 1990 and 1991. In his essay “Who Is ‘My Nabokov?’” which appeared in Ulbandus: The  Slavic Review of Columbia University in 2007, Boyd describes an experience similar to mine:

 

“Tantalized by the Time magazine cover story on Nabokov at the time of Ada’s publication, and by his dazzlingly individual perceptions and expression, I scoured the city public library for the latest Nabokov novel in its stacks. By then in my final year at high school, I read Pale Fire with more enchantment and exhilaration than anything I  had ever encountered -- and I still regularly recall that sense of explosive discovery and vivid magic when I think of the best in Nabokov, or when the fresh blast of discovery shakes me in anyone else’s fictive worlds.”

 

There's nothing to compare to a young person smitten not merely by reading but literature. The Time magazine cover is based on a portrait in oils painted by Gerard de Rose in Montreux, Switzerland, in February 1969. The magazine added two butterflies, three Scrabble pieces in Cyrillic script, a reproduction of a 1910 drawing of the novelist’s mother and two onion domes from St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, a city Nabokov passed through briefly by train in 1917 while fleeing to Crimea but never again visited.

 

On page 103 in Ada, in the paragraph beginning “He learned her face,” Van Veen says: “Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive.”