Word: artful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...clash is not between the characters, but between the author and the world." Nabokov's books are conceived like the chess problems that he has composed during the past half-century. He describes in an early novel the miraculous way in which a flat, abstract contrivance (in chess or art) can take on vitality and light: "Little by little, the pieces and squares began to come to life and exchange impressions. The crude might of the queen was transformed into refined power, restrained and directed by a system of sparkling levers; the pawns grew cleverer; the knights stepped forth with...
...pursuit of butterflies and poetic perceptions provided Nabokov with a conception central to his existence?of art and science seen not as antagonists but as allies in capturing and celebrating the delightful, eccentric and always individual surfaces of life. Yet his feeling at times encompasses an almost mystic vision of beatitude. "This is ecstasy," he once wrote about standing alone in green woods among rare butterflies. "Behind the ecstasy is something else which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill...
...Nabokovs entertained sparingly and cared only to see a few close friends. They were too busy. Besides, science (lepidopterology) was once again coming to the aid of Vladimir's art. Its handmaiden was technology in the form of a 1952 Buick, bought mainly to search for specimens in the West. Vera did the driving. Nabokov, with the security of a man who is good at nearly everything, easily concedes he cannot handle a car, adding generously, "There are some people who can refold maps, too, but I am not one of them." Every summer they coursed up and down Arizona...
...perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality, and moral truth. Pretending to be a curio, it cannot disguise the fact that it is one of the great works of art of this century...
...infused with a poetic sense of the sanctity of all life and with the faculty of a primitive animist?vestigial in modern man ?of investing inanimate objects with life. He is inclined to deny that any utility, morality or heavy philosophical meaning should be attributed to his art. He dismisses such suggestions with the same scorn that he once made use of when a clubwoman asked him what butterflies were for. Nevertheless, certain deductions can be drawn from Nabokov's writing. In Bend Sinister, he composed a picture of crude, lumpish evil-in-power, and he put Yeats' much...