Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Looming influences on his works are Balzac, Faulkner, Kafka, and Cervantes, "who is the greatest writer in the world--he knows all the secrets of life...
...They don't try to understand Kafka or Finnegans Wake...
Moravia said Dostoyevsky has had the most influence upon his writing. He noted too the influences of Kafka, Hemingway, and Bocaccio...
...cosmopolitan, eccentric lecturer: authoritarian but also authoritative, alternately mock-stern and mischievous (he sometimes started over in mid-lecture, to see how long it would take the class to notice), arrogant yet never harsh, in fact downright kindly at times. After explaining that the transformed Gregor Samsa in Kafka's The Metamorphosis was not a cockroach but a beetle, and that beneath his carapace he possessed unsuspected wings, Nabokov told his students: "This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have...
...enormous success of Lolita in 1958, which freed Nabokov from teaching, made most people aware for the first time that he had practically a lifetime of such writing behind him. Had the students only known it, their professor was not only explaining Dickens or Flaubert or Kafka. With his quirky insights, his cunning traceries and meticulous diagrams, he was also charting the mind of another great novelist: himself. -By Christopher Porterfield