1France — the land, its language, and its literature — haunted Nabokov’s life, his memory and imagination.

2His first encounters with the country, all the same, seem less than radiant. His parents took him, aged two, and Sergey, fifteen months, to Biarritz in the summer of 1901. When V. D. Nabokov had to return to St Petersburg to teach at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, his wife took the boys to her brother Vasily’s château, Perpignàa (Jurançon). All Nabokov later recalled of the trip was a shining wet roof.1 His first enduring memory of Paris, from 1903, when Sergey was taken there for an operation, was of keeping boredom at bay by spitting into the courtyard of the Hôtel Continental from his fourth floor window (Nabokov interview with Mazars). In the summer of 1904, in Beaulieu, he “fell in love for almost the first time, succumbing to the charms of a dark-eyed Rumanian girl with what seemed to him the strange-sounding surname of Ghika” (Boyd, 1990, 51).

3His first sustained immersion in French was no better than his first encounters with France. Already fluent in Russian and, thanks to nurses, governesses and Anglophile parents, in English, he resented the arrival in the winter of 1906 of a French governess, Mlle Cécile Miauton. Thinking that “anything was better than an unknown Frenchwoman” (Drugie berega, 89), he cajoled Sergey into making a break for freedom through the snow and the encroaching gloom.

4The gloom lifted by mid-year as he became fluent in his third language. Future trips to France would also be more rewarding and more memorable. In Biarritz in late 1907 he fell in love with a Serbian girl called Zika, then two years later, on the same beach, and more seriously, with Claude Deprès, his first French girlfriend, the “First Love” of Speak, Memory.

5Nabokov never felt much love, on the other hand, for querulous and corpulent Mlle Miauton, Speak, Memory’s “Mademoiselle O.” But he did love the exposure to French literature that she gave him. She read to her charges for as much as three hours a day (see Nabokov’s New York Post interview, 10), starting with Corneille’s Le Cid and Hugo’s Les Misérables (Nabokov interview with Pivot). She remained with the family until 1915, by which time Nabokov had been at school for five years. There, he was irked by his French class taking a whole winter to study Merimée’s (“boring”) “Colomba.” But his real French education was self-directed, in his father’s library (Nabokov interview with Pivot). He soon m oved beyond Dumas and Verne. By twelve he had read all France’s “blessed poets” (Nabokov interview with Pivot) (as he renamed the poètes maudits), especially Verlaine and Rimbaud, and all of Flaubert’s prose (Nabokov interview with Dommergues, 94). He always retained “a special love” for Flaubert (Nabokov interview with Duvignaud, 24), for a long time rating Madame Bovary the greatest of all novels, “2000 metres higher than Anna Karenina” (unpublished letter to Mark Aldanov, May 6, 1942).

6Later Nabokov would say that even if the Revolution had not happened he “would have lived in France or Italy” (Nabokov interview with Duvignaud, 24). Revolution or not, he would also have studied in England — where the Revolution propelled his family in 1919. There, he took a degree at Cambridge (1919-1922) in French and Russian literature, reading back into mediaeval texts in both languages. While still an undergraduate he translated Rolland’s novel Colas Breugnon, with its exuberantly antiquated French, into a Russian to match. A year later, his first letter to his future wife, Véra, in July 1923, happens to mention that he remembers Ronsard by heart (Letters to Véra, 4). Throughout this decade he was also reading Bergson and Proust.

7After Cambridge, Nabokov moved to Berlin to be with his family. In order to preserve and develop Russian as his literary instrument, he remained there — in the linguistic shelterbelt of his limited knowledge of German — even after the centre of the Russian emigration moved to Paris in 1924. By the beginning of the 1930s he was the literary star of the emigration, his novels regularly published serially in Paris’s Sovremennye zapiski. Late in 1932 he visited France for the first time since achieving émigré fame, “partly an exploratory mission — could he and Véra find some means of living there?” (Boyd, 1990, 390). When not giving readings to Russian literary Paris or meeting other émigré writers he made friends with French writers like Jules Supervielle, Jean Paulhan, and Gabriel Marcel, and networked with Paris publishers in the hopes of having his novels and stories translated (La Course du fou, 1933; Chambre obscure, 1934; L’Aguet, 1935).

8A future closer to France and French literature might have materialized had Hitler not come to power. Nabokov soon became anxious to put more distance between Germany and the future of his family (now including Dmitri) than France could guarantee. In 1934an agent managed to sell rights to Camera obscura and Despair to a London publisher. The weakness of the Camera obscura translation led to Nabokov’s offering to translate Despair himself, as he did in 1935, and to writing first, as preparation for the translation and for a possible shift of location and language, a short autobiographical sketch in English, emphasizing his early associations with Britain.

9Still unable to find Véra and Dmitri a secure future outside Germany, Nabokov returned to Paris in January 1936, by way of Brussels. In Brussels the writer Zinaida Shakhovskoy had arranged, to his surprise, for him to give a French reading. Carrying on in the vein of his English memoir, he hurriedly composed his essay-memoir-story “Mademoiselle O,” about his French governess and his French education (published in Mesures 2:2, April 15, 1936; later chapter 5 of Speak, Memory). He thought little of his first sustained work in French, perhaps because it came so easily, until its enthusiastic reception made him see its prospects. In Brussels he also became friends with novelist Franz Hellens, whose Oeil-de-Dieu he had admired for years. In Paris in February, as in Brussels in January, he had successful public readings in French as well as in Russian.

10Apprehensive though she was about the financial insecurity of starting a new life outside Germany, where the Nabokovs could live cheaply with her cousin, Véra became even more alarmed when one of the two assassins of Nabokov’s father was appointed second-in-command to Hitler’s head of Russian affairs. She promptly sent her husband to Paris in January 1937 to set up a new life there or in England. Nabokov worked hard at trying to establish a base in either country, but he was also soon deep in an affair with the poet Irina Guadanini. After Véra heard about this, and despite her husband’s denials, she was reluctant to join him in France. He had to rejoin her and Dmitri in Prague (where his mother lived) before bringing them back to Cannes, where he broke off finally with Guadanini. The Nabokovs moved on to Menton, Moulinet and Cap d’Antibes, and then to Paris. There, without work permits, they found France every bit as difficult financially as Véra had dreaded. Although living in France and still writing in Russian, Nabokov kept trying to break into Anglophone publishing or academic worlds: with war looming, he wrote The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and travelled twice to London in 1939 to network with writers, publishers and academics.

11Back in Paris, two fateful events ensured both that he would leave France and that he would ultimately return in unexpected ways. At the end of summer 1939 émigré novelist and friend Mark Aldanov passed on to him an offer to teach creative writing at Stanford, which allowed him eventually to obtain an entry visa to the USA and an exit visa from France; and on September 3, as Nabokov recalled (Nabokov interview with Mazars), two days after war was declared, a photograph of an ape drawing the bars of his cage prompted him to write Volčebnik (The Enchanter), the first throb of the Lolita theme, but for now rooted very firmly in the parks and apartments of Paris. In late May 1940 Nabokov at last extricated his family from a France already being invaded by Germany.

12In the USA he became an American writer, a semi-professional lepidopterist, and a professor of Slavic and European literature. The unpublished Enchanter haunted him enough for him to transpose the story to America and expand it into a novel. Concerned that the new book could cause a scandal for Cornell, where he now taught, he planned to publish it anonymously. Not yet quite trusting that his English would allow him to pass for an American, and wanting to hide his Russian identity, he made Humbert bilingual in French and English, with a professional specialization in Anglo-French literary relations, especially via Baudelaire’s interest in Poe.

13At the same time as he was writing Lolita, at the beginning of the 1950s, Nabokov also began to teach Madame Bovary and À la recherche du temps perdu in his new Masterpieces of European Fiction course, to read Genet, and, in preparation for his commentary on Eugene Onegin, to reread voraciously in the French literature available to Pushkin, “all of French literature to Chateaubriand” (Nabokov interview with Guérin, 32). He dismissed the “journalist” Marivaux, loved the Abbé Prevost and André Chénier, was dazzled by Diderot, bored by Sade and delighted by Senancourt (Nabokov interview with Guérin; interview with Delpech; interview with “MV”, 1). In his Onegin commentary, Marijeta Bozovic has convincingly proposed, Nabokov deliberately sought to reweight the canon toward English, Russian, and French as the three key literatures of modern Europe.2 Meanwhile, nearing the end of Lolita, working on the scene of Humbert’s visit to the seventeen-year-old, pregnant Lolita, Nabokov cried as he composed the scene, “like Flaubert at the death of Madame Bovary” (Nabokov interview with Delpech, 2).

14Unable to sell Lolita to American publishers, Nabokov contacted his Franco-Russian friend, translator and agent, Doussia Ergaz, to help him publish the novel in France. She soon found Olympia Press. Within months of its 1955 publication Lolita’s quality and daring originality of theme and tone caused literary rumbles and grumbles on both sides of the Atlantic. Historical accident — the Franco-British alliance in the Suez Crisis — even led to the novel’s English original being banned in famously open-minded France while legally importable into a still stuffy England. In 1958, Lolita was published in the USA. Rich enough to take leave from Cornell, and soon, to retire, Nabokov travelled late in 1959 to Europe, for the first time since 1940, just as Lolita was about to be launched in England and in French translation.

15He was lionized by French reporters, and especially enjoyed his meeting with Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose work he admired more than any French writer since Proust. On the morning of his first Paris interview, staying again at the Hôtel Continental, opposite the Jardin des Tuileries, he happened to stumble on “the person running the Tuileries puppet show,… opening out from a very small box a heap of accessories, decors, and even a stall. It was like Proust’s madeleine, from which a whole world emerges” (Nabokov interview with Mazars). But the world of his pre-war memories had changed: motorboats had replaced sailboats in the Tuileries boating ponds of his childhood; the smell of petrol was no longer the same; he missed the old red and yellow taxis; he welcomed the proliferation of bathrooms.

16Without planning to do so, Nabokov found himself living for the remainder of his life in Francophone milieus, in Geneva, Nice and especially Montreux. An admirer of Chateaubriand since childhood, he suggested that the 1961 French translation of his autobiography should be called “Le Château que baignait la Dore” or “Douce souvenance” (Nabokov to Doussia Ergaz, October 30, 1951, Véra Nabokov to Ergaz, April 21, 1956).

17He made Sybil Shade a translator into French of English verse, and supervised closely Pale Fire’s translation into French. His longest novel, Ada, written largely in Montreux and set partly in Mont Roux, takes place mostly in a North America as French as it is English. Despite that, the novel caused French translators nightmares, and Nabokov had to spend six intense months, at 75, carefully revamping the translation. Ada ou l’ardeur was hailed by L’Express in 1975 as “le plus beau livre de souvenirs [!] depuis Proust et Chateaubriand”. On the eve of its launch, Bernard Pivot was thrilled to be able to secure an interview with Nabokov for his much admired television show Apostrophes, and later judged it the best of the series and rescreened it again and again (Boyd, 1991, 652).

18Nabokov had more than once apologized to interviewers for speaking French slowly (Nabokov interview with Dommergues, 94); he would say to Pivot: “Comme la plupart des Nabokovs, et comme beaucoup de Russes (Lénine, par exemple) je parlais ma langue natale avec un petit grasseyement qui ne me gênait guère en français (quoiqu’il était loin de l’adorable ‘ r’roulé des chanteuses de cabaret parisiennes) mais dont je me hâtais de me débarrasser en anglais” (Nabokov interview with Pivot); in an earlier interview he had described himself as a Petersburger with a Parisian grasseyement in Russian, who in French rolled his Rs in the Russian manner (Nabokov interview with Dommergues, 95). But two years after Pivot, Nabokov was interred above Montreux with a tombstone bearing an inscription only in French:

“Vladimir Nabokov
Écrivain
1899-1977”

19After Nabokov’s death, his widow and then their son remained in Montreux, until Dmitri’s death in 2012. Maurice Couturier, who in 1976 submitted a doctorate on Nabokov, the first French thesis on a still-living author, emerged as the leader of French criticism, scholarship and translation of Nabokov. Novelist Gilles Barbedette translated L’Enchanteur from Dmitri’s English version of the original Russian novella set in France, and published it, for the first time in any language, in 1985. He also launched the Pléiade volumes of Nabokov’s fiction, the most extensively annotated texts in any language, but died before the project was far advanced. Couturier took over the editorship, and the mentoring of younger French Nabokovians, and the deepening of ties between French and Anglophone scholarship through a series of conferences in Nice.

20How thrilling to see the energies of these younger French Nabokovians! They have even recently set up a French Nabokov society, Les Chercheurs Enchantés. There have been excellent French conferences prior to “Vladimir Nabokov et la France,” but there had never before been one focused on Nabokov and France, or one that attracted so many fine Nabokovians from around the world with interests and expertise in the way France haunted Nabokov and Nabokov haunts France.