Scholarly evaluation of Vladimir Nabokov’s oeuvre has gone through many phases over the years, from an early emphasis on cerebral play (in English-language criticism), to ethics, metaphysics, and social and cultural contexts. In recent years, scholars have devoted increasing interest to the scientific dimensions of Nabokov’s art, and Stephen Blackwell has been a leading participant in this development. As he observes in his new book, most close readers of Nabokov had not thought much about the significance of trees in the writer’s work, but once he started investigating the subject, he kept finding more and more thought-provoking material. The result of his investigation is a fascinating set of observations and analyses.

His initial premise, outlined in the introduction to his book, is a simple one: “trees form a central and essential part of Nabokov’s worldview … and even, perhaps, his metaphysics” (3). This began with Nabokov’s early work: trees are mentioned in about forty percent of his published poems and seventy-five percent of his short stories. What particularly interests Blackwell is the notion that “even if a tree seems to be just a tree, it is always ready, in Nabokov’s world, to become something more” (14). It is this “more” that forms the nucleus of Blackwell’s explorations.

In the first chapters of the book, Blackwell focuses on Nabokov’s early work, tracing recurring links between trees, creative consciousness, and memory. Blackwell offers fresh perspectives on these works, noting, for example, a disturbing development in The Defense, where objects made of wood seen or used by Luzhin in his boyhood and maturity as a chess player (violin, chess pieces, walking stick), disappear by the end of the novel, and Luzhin’s world is stripped of positively charged trees as he moves inexorably toward his tragic fate.

In Ch. 3, Blackwell moves further into Nabokov’s career and devotes considerable attention to Invitation to a Beheading. Acknowledging the centrality of images of oaks in the novel, Blackwell rescues the tree from the often negative evaluations these images have received in Nabokov criticism. Significantly, Blackwell’s discussion may cause some critics (including this reviewer) to revise their interpretation of this aspect of the novel. Turning to The Gift, Blackwell shows how one’s knowledge and love of the natural world can intertwine with knowledge and love of other human beings. As he sees it, this interlacement radiates outward from The Gift into the second half of Nabokov’s career. Lolita provides a tragic illustration of what happens when this interlacement is absent. Nabokov depicts Humbert Humbert as defiantly ignorant and unobservant of the world around him, and this ignorance extends sadly to his treatment of Dolly Haze as well. The profusion of references Humbert makes to chestnuts throughout most of the novel is striking, especially for a tree that was nearly extinct in the United States at the time of the novel’s setting, but, as Blackwell argues, their sudden disappearance toward the end of the novel accompanies and signals a new clarity and understanding taking place within Humbert himself. Something similar occurs in Pale Fire, where the misidentification of junipers as cedars highlights the themes of disguise, mistaken identity, and solipsistic blindness.

Chapter 5 discusses the appearance of trees in framed settings: in works of visual and verbal art, with the latter affording greater opportunity for allusive and subtextual referentiality. Chapter 6 is devoted to the profusion of trees in Ada, where Blackwell finds three central tree-related components: the family tree, associated with family secrets; the shattal apple, or tree of knowledge, which is associated with carnality and sexual desire; and the oak, both physically present or artistically framed. For Blackwell, it is the oak that pulls together the themes of art, death, and transcendence. In the book’s epilogue, Blackwell analyzes Nabokov’s late narrative poem “The Ballad of Longwood Glen,” showing how Nabokov urges his readers to look more closely at works and the world, thus achieving “self-transcendence” (176).

Blackwell has produced a work of great erudition and insight. Generously crediting his predecessors in Nabokov scholarship, Blackwell calls attention to an overlooked aspect of Nabokov’s art and restores it to the central position he maintains it should occupy. His book, complete with illustrations and lists of trees in individual works, will engage both lovers of Nabokov and those who believe in the importance of trees in art and life.