Brian boyd fish
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From a specially-bound set of Nabokov's early Russian poems, inscribed by Nabokov for his wife Vera. Image from Vera's Butterflies (NY: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 1999). Courtesy of the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov.
A commentator from a distant southern land that begins with Z composes an outlandish elucidation of another man’s masterpiece. His startling, perhaps outrageous claims upset certain entrenched academic specialists, and he must flee (a world tour, a centenary), and undergo the ordeals of exile before coming to rest, in some almost successful disguise—as a professor of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. An unlikely plot, but the real story is no less exceptional: Brian Boyd, author of the prize-winning two-volume biography,Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian YearsandVladimir Nabokov: The American Years, and ofNabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousnessand the just-releasedNabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, is a scholar who changed his mind.
Writing inThe New York Observeron Boyd’s “remarkable, obsessive, delirious, devotional s
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Boyd, Brian
Brian Boyd (1952- ), University Distinguished Professor, English and Drama, Auckland, New Zealand, has worked on Nabokov since the early 1970s, as an annotator, archivist, bibliographer, biographer, critic, editor, and translator, and on documentary and photographic projects.
He discovered Nabokov at high school, wrote about him as a freshman at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, and there went on to write an MA thesis on Pale Fire, Ada, and Transparent Things (1974), which Nabokov read and commended. Boyd wrote a PhD dissertation at Toronto on “Nabokov and Ada” (1979), which characteristically paid attention to small details and large structures, and to the relation between Nabokov’s style and his thought, metaphysical and ethical, throughout his work. Carl Proffer read the first chapters and sent them to Véra Nabokov, who asked to see more.
After submitting his thesis, Boyd in the spring of 1979 researched in the libraries of the US Northeast, with the intention of writing a bibliography of Nabokov to correct Andrew Field’s 1973 bibliogra
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Atlas Hugged and the Nature of Fiction, with Brian Boyd
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Brian Boyd is a renowned evolutionary literary scholar (The Origin of Stories), biographer of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1,2,3), and 2020 recipient of the Rutherford Medal, New Zealand's highest academic honor. He is the perfect person to discuss my first novel, Atlas Hugged, and the interplay between fiction and the real world. In the second half, we also discuss Brian's biography-in-progress of the legendary philosopher of science, Karl Popper, who pioneered the study of epistemology from an evolutionary perspective.
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