Brian Boyd

We are all exiles. In time, if not in space, we are inevitably parted from what is most familiar and dear to us. ‘Loss’ is stamped in all our passports. Vladimir Nabokov understood exile better than anyone. Heir to a wealthy landowning family in Imperial Russia, he escaped the communist revolution of 1917 to a life of genteel poverty in a Berlin boarding house. Eking out a living as a tennis and language tutor, he built a reputation by the 1930s as one of the best Russian writers alive. With his Jewish wife, Vera, Nabokov fled from Germany to France, and then to the United States. His father, a prominent liberal, was shot by a right-wing assassin in 1922. His gay brother, Sergey, was murdered in a concentration camp in 1945.

At the dangerous time when Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey were around, the sonnet sprang into English from Petrarch’s Italian. A constant cuckoo, it has stayed in our linguistic tradition ever since. It is an odd verse form to have done so, regular, yet in one way asymmetrical. Moreover, this cuckoo form has long stood at the heart of what we mean by ‘lyrical’. As Wordsworth quotably if unsubtly wrote, ‘With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.’ Borges was to see through that romantic sense of the poet-dramatist in his mini-story ‘Everything and Nothing’, where God and the playwright eventually come face to face: that is if they have faces at all. Or hearts.

Anyone who has found herself in a supermarket late on Thursday when a new checkout opens will have no trouble understanding why evolutionary biologists have struggled to explain the development of altruism in humans. In On Natural Selection, Darwin asserts: ‘In social animals [nature] will adapt the structure of each individual for the benefit of the community, if each in consequence profits by the selected change.’ Yet, practically, how could that adaptation first develop outside family groups? How could a lone altruist achieve anything but loss?