Word: knightly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Khrushchev trip. Among those ranged against Khrushchev: United Auto Workers' Walter Reuther; International Union of Electrical Workers' James Carey; Papermakers and Paperworkers' Paul Phillips; Maritime Union's Joseph Curran; Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers' Orie Albert ("Jack") Knight; Brewery Workers' Karl Feller. Excerpts...
...REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT (205 pp.)-Vladimir Nabokov-New Directions...
When fame strikes a writer late, reprints of his earlier works sometimes become exciting discoveries. This is what Boris Pasternak's publishers hope for with his slim, 1934 story The Last Summer (see below); similarly, Vladimir Nabokov's literary handlers hope that The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) will acquire Lolita's gilt by association. The first book Nabokov wrote in English (his workshop was the bathroom of his one-room Paris flat), Sebastian Knight has a low sex quotient and no nymphets. Instead, it is devoted to themes that novelists seem to be born with...
Sebastian Knight, a novelist, has fallen through the last trap door, death. His half brother, the nameless first-person narrator of the novel, feels the loss like a psychic amputation. It is as if a great secret had been buried with Sebastian, perhaps the meaning of life itself. The half brother determines to ferret out the secret by reconstructing Sebastian Knight's life in a biography. His quest takes him to a college chum of Sebastian's at Cambridge who recalls a miserable emigre trying desperately to be more pukka than the sahibs. (Nabokov graduated from Cambridge...
...argument suggests that Nabokov is applying The Method to writing. He occupies his characters like houses; they have the lived-in look. As early as Sebastian Knight, Nabokov's writing was rich in fringe benefits. There is his animistic imagery: a stopped clock face wears "the waxed moustache of ten minutes to two," the first spring zephyrs are "cold-limbed ballet-girls waiting in the wings." There is the unflinching refusal to sacrifice art to the urgencies of politics: "Time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936-it was always year 1." There is the verbal clowning...