Nabokov’s Secret Trees by Stephen H.Blackwell. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2024. 302 pp. $80.00. ISBN 978‐1‐4875‐5444‐6

Stephen H. Blackwell is among the finest Nabokov specialists writing today. His most recent contribution, the first book-length study of “trees,” which includes trees, shrubs, and all manner of tree-like plants, their visual effects and otherwise-than-natural representations in Nabokov’s art, is a true achievement. Its rather humble but novel thesis, that trees are intentional “focal points within Nabokov’s work,” offering entry into or affording confrontation with the mysteriousness that “sits right at the core of Nabokov’s artistic (even philosophical) outlook,” is secured by the patient and methodical movement of his argument (pp. 44, 123). Blackwell weaves together a wealth of close readings of key passages ranging from the author’s earliest poetry and under-studied stories and novels, such as “Gods,” Mary, and Bend Sinister, to the great and wooded masterpieces of the author’s autobiography(s) and best-loved novels, including but not limited to Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire (see, see now, the “little scientific digression” on page 113), and Ada. His argument is secure: Nabokov persistently increased both the number of trees and the complexity of the “tree” theme “on all planes of his works’ aesthetic being,” “from the earliest days of Nabokov’s adulthood, [when] trees figured prominently in the blending, interpenetrations, and grey zones between ‘art’ and ‘reality’ within his work,” to Ada, in which “at least sixty-two species of trees […] the most in any Nabokov work” come together in “an elaborate performance in which trees play a dominant, though characteristically understated, frequently ironized role” (pp. 161, 120, 151). Yet there are places where Blackwell seems to have sensed that certain aspects of his argument may need to be walked back a bit. In most every chapter the reader comes across, at almost necessary moments, at least one or two sentences such as these: “Needless to say, Nabokov was not writing his novels about trees. But trees were helping him to explore and express some aspects of what he was writing about” (p. 61). Almost necessary. I do not think these “hold your horses” moments are always and entirely successful. Their appearance in the text gave me the impression that Blackwell may in fact be arguing for those very things which are needless to deny—creating absent reasons for doubt. The argument is strong despite them; it would be stronger without them. So, for instance, when reading Blackwell assert that “the shadows [produced by trees] or trees are among the places where Nabokov frequently encodes potent artistic fermentation”—he is at a point in his argument where he can very clearly take this for granted—I realized right then that I had already been convinced some time ago of the intricacy and the care with which Nabokov cast his arboreal designs (p. 130). I was not in doubt, but I had been, and there were times when the doubt seemed induced. Minor rhetorical issues, really, but ones that, in my reading, seemed to imbalance Blackwell’s otherwise deft, at times exhilarating, and always tending-toward-the-exhaustive survey of the great determination and dexterity with which “Nabokov used trees as hidden or explicit analogies for creativity, memory, consciousness, epistemology, and metaphysics” (p. 151). Blackwell even supplies his own almost-Audubon guidebook in the form of rich appendices: “List of Trees in Nabokov’s Works”; “All Trees (and Effects) in Nabokov’s Poems, by Year”; “All Trees in Nabokov’s Novels and Stories, by Work”; “List of Trees and Shrubs Mentioned in the Works of Shakespeare.” All will enjoy the artistic productions in “Nabokov’s Invented and Real Trees, in Images,” several of which serve as decorative chapter-section headings. There is much to affirm and to praise in Blackwell’s study of Nabokov’s trees, though some aspects of his argument gave me pause, not least the kind of knowledge or experience trees seem to afford within Nabokov’s art. Blackwell follows Nabokov by comparing a literary text to the world, in that “consciousness can work to know it, progressively, at greater depth and detail,” to which Blackwell adds the gloss: “The task of knowing the world is really the only purpose of consciousness in the rawest sense (leaving aside subcategories like knowing others, and ethically separate areas like loving)” (p. 4). I am not so sure Nabokov would agree with this, nor am I confident that knowing others is a subcategory of knowledge of the world. Nabokov rather seems to suggest, in the more poignant and the love-filled moments of his prose and poetry that it is love for the personal other that consciousness ultimately serves. The world accompanies but never precedes the other. By Nabokov’s own admission, knowledge of the intricate world of a literary text is valuable to the extent that it enables the reader to perceive, confront, or somehow even participate in the consciousness behind the text. From this it follows that the trees Charles Kinbote (Pale Fire) calls “sacred,” the “fir trunk” in which he perceives God’s “watermark,” and the “foliage” Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev (The Gift) marvels at in his “list of donations already made: 10,000 days—from Person Unknown” must necessarily, as they indeed do, afford experiences with the natural world that, far from merely “metaphysical” (p. 115), would be better and more properly described as “mystical,” if not outright theological (for Kinbote, it cannot be otherwise). But why are these two rather memorable passages in which “trees” (broadly conceived) fund unique experiences with the world—the “fir trunk” passage (Pale Fire) and the “foliage/Person Unknown” passage (The Gift)—absent from Blackwell’s study? Perhaps because they make no mention of specific trees, real or imagined, but only evoke them as one of many natural phenomena the mystically inclined may discover in idealized, mysticalized, even theologized Nature. Another plausible explanation is that Blackwell’s focus, first and foremost, as he admits and clarifies repeatedly, is epistemological as opposed to “metaphysical” (broadly conceived). His analysis of Nabokov’s arboreal art reveals not only the ways the author in his literary context found trees excellent tools to think with, but Blackwell in his own turn enviably demonstrates the different ways that Nabokov’s trees continue to branch out, funding new avenues of inquiry that simultaneously complement Nabokov’s immediate concerns and respond to contemporary transdisciplinary ones (see his excellent reflection on trees and translation on pages 90–91). So, also, chapter 4, “Knowledge-Amplified Love: Trees and Epistemology in Nabokov’s Worlds,” struck this reader as the epistemological correlate to Dana Dragunoiu’s moral vision in Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts (2021). But what I was left with, ultimately, as I reread Nabokov’s Secret Trees, was that very near the center of Nabokov’s writing is the writing of a “Book of Nature.” In this writing, the natural world more generally and trees especially sustain experiences which the descriptor “metaphysical” struggles to describe. Blackwell admirably demonstrates time and again that Nabokov’s trees are “not only what they are” and “give more than they have” (to quote Maritain). These are not metaphysical phenomena. To describe them so dilutes their power. In the case of many of Nabokov’s characters, not least Cincinnatus C. (Invitation to a Beheading), Fyodor, and Kinbote, it must be said that Nabokov’s trees restore the world and our own selves to us, mystified, re-sacralized.

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