The American Century: Literature since 1945 745how the feelings her mother repressed have toughened and tempered her. “Her
anger annealed me, / ” Piercy declares. “I was dipped into the cauldron of boiling
rage and rose / a warrior and a witch.” But, the poet adds, she is “still vulnerable /
there where she held me” because “our minds were woven together.” Other poems
explore how ordinary women “must learn again to speak / starting with I / starting
with We” (“Unlearning to not speak”), or the potential for “a woman peppery as
curry” in even the most “ordinary pudgy downcast girl” (“The woman in the
ordinary”). Still others, such as “The Chuppah” or “The perpetual migration,”
expose the impulse Piercy has inherited from her immigrant family always to go
forward toward “the mountains of freedom.” “If I turn back,” she says, “it feels /
wrong.” Like Paley, or for that matter Olsen, Piercy is a writer of conscience, who
may admit to being haunted but sees her work as an act of exorcism. For her, the
ghosts of the past, from Europe or elsewhere, do not paralyze; on the contrary, they
propel her on to the future.
It is difficult to think of a European émigré writer further from all this than
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977). In fact, the verbal shift that seems required, from
immigrant to émigré, suggests some of the difference. Nabokov was born into a
wealthy, prominent family in St. Petersburg, Russia and as a youth traveled
extensively. His father, a liberal aristocratic jurist, opposed the tyranny of the czar
then that of the bolsheviks. He took his family into exile, then was murdered in
Berlin in 1922 by a reactionary White Russian who later became a Nazi official.
Nabokov lived in Berlin and Paris between the two world wars. There, he produced
a critically acclaimed series of poems, short stories, and novels in Russian. Then, in
1940, in flight from various forms of totalitarianism, he emigrated to the United
States where he began teaching Russian literature. His first novel in English, The Real
Life of Sebastian Knight, was published in 1941; it concerns a young Russian in Paris,
the narrator, who discovers the true nature of his half-brother, an English novelist,
while writing his biography. This was followed by Bend Sinister in 1947, about a
politically uncommitted professor in a totalitarian state who tries to maintain
personal integrity. Four years later, Nabokov published his first memoir, Conclusive
Evidence, later retitled Speak, Memory and, under this title, revised and expanded in- Four years after that, in turn, came the book that established his fortune, his
reputation for some and his notoriety for others, Lolita, published first in France
then, after censorship problems were resolved, in the United States in 1958. It tells of
the passion of a middle-aged European émigré, who calls himself Humbert Humbert,
for what he terms “nymphets” in general and the 12-year-old girl he calls Lolita in
particular, and their wanderings across America. It was Nabokov’s first novel set in
his new home in the New World; and its success allowed him to devote himself full
time to his writing. Three more novels appeared after the first publication of Lolita:
among them, Pale Fire (1962), a postmodernist tour de force purporting to be a poem
about an exiled Balkan king in a New England college town and the involved critical
commentary on the poem by an academic who admits to being the king himself.
Along with the two other novels, Pnin (1957) and Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
(1969), there are novellas, short stories, a play, critical studies and commentary,
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