![]() Measured by the sheer number of miles covered, Nabokov is the most American of authors. The wonder is that Nabokov survived at all. In other words, at the height of the Cold War, an expatriate Russian novelist with the resonant name of Vladimir was roaming through the reddest of red states, researching a book about a jaded aristocrat’s sexual obsession with “nymphets” (a coinage the book put in the Oxford English Dictionary). Nabokov wrote his disturbingly compelling classic, “ Lolita,” over the course of five breathless years, from 1948 to 1953, filling 5-by-7 cards with notes he took riding shotgun while his designated driver, his wife, Véra, drove their black Oldsmobile from Ithaca, N.Y., to Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. I used to say that I felt like Humbert Humbert, the notoriously unreliable narrator of “Lolita,” who made a similar trip, but instead of traveling with a precocious preteen girl, I was traveling with a wife and a dewy-eyed dog.īut then I learned that Vladimir Nabokov himself had done the same thing. For the last 15 years my wife, Sarah, and I have driven every summer with our golden retriever from New Jersey to the Northern Rockies. ![]()
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