the gift; Writer James Salter remembers passing an hour with time-obsessed, and yet timeless, Vladimir Nabokov.

Byline: James Salter

Sometime around 1950 I came across his name, which I first mispronounced, to myself and aloud, with the accent on Nab. It was a professor's name or a musician's, and in fact he was a professor at the time, at Cornell. I'd only a glimpse of what he could do, a published chapter of what was finally Speak, Memory, his partial autobiography. That one glimpse was enough.

I love to write about Nabokov and also to think about him. I love his attitude that he is incomparable, his lofty judgments and general scorn of other writers-not all of them, of course. His first American publisher, James Laughlin of New Directions, described Nabokov as a doll, but in a very severe, upper-crust way, Laughlin said, wanting no nincompoops for friends.

He was upper crust, from a wealthy and distinguished St. Petersburg family with a large country estate, Vyra, where Nabokov spent part of an idyllic boyhood, secure and well loved, in the early years of a century that was to become catastrophic. He might have gone on to spend an elegantly civilized life writing poems and avidly hunting butterflies-the life in eternity I hope he is having now-in a reformed and democratic Russia where his father could very well have been minister of justice, but all of that disappeared in the savage fighting and then murderous tyranny that followed the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The family lost everything and fled the country. Nabokov never saw his homeland again.

Like the sun rising in some distant place, slowly, among clouds that hold back its brilliance, was how he came to be known in the English-speaking world. His first novels were written in Russian, in Berlin, and had only the relatively small audience of Russian emigres there in the twenties and thirties. One of his contemporaries, the writer Nina Berberova, also in exile, placed an early laurel on his brow. "A tremendous, mature, sophisticated modern writer was before me," she wrote, "a great Russian writer, like a phoenix, was born from the ashes of revolution and exile. Our existence from now on acquired a meaning. All my generation were justified. We were saved."

I used the word glimpse, but it was not like something you see briefly and remember, the girl in the white dress alone on the steps of a farmhouse far from the road. Written pages are something that can be returned to, reclaimed, and when they are marvelous never lose their power. One of the astonishing things about Nabokov's is how uncondescending they are, rich, exciting, beautiful, haughty. He was a self-taught butterfly expert-he grandly called hunting butterflies the noblest sport in the world and one of the two most intense pleasures known to man, the second being writing-and a genius. After I met him-I'll come to that-I made it a point to talk to people who had known him, for the most part at Cornell, where he taught from 1948 to 1959.

"What did you talk about?" I asked a man who had shared an office with him.