Word: lolitas
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Author Vladimir Nabokov was in the news in two distant lands, where his controversial novel Lolita was upsetting both decent and indecent folks. In New Zealand a Supreme Court judge upheld a customs ban on the book. Ruled Sir Douglas Hutchison: "With the best consideration I can give it, I think Lolita is aphrodisiac.'' A sort of proof of his contention came in Israel, where one Joseph Wahrhaftig was nabbed for behavior tending to corrupt the morals of a minor girl. Wahrhaftig recently translated Lolita into Hebrew...
...Fate. "Only three weeks ago," said Composer Nicolas Nabokov, cousin of the U.S.'s bestselling Novelist Vladimir (Lolita) Nabokov, "they held Boris Pasternak's funeral outside Moscow. Though the newspapers printed no word of it. 1,500 people came [TIME, June 13]. Though nothing of Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago has ever been published in Russia, a single unknown young person stepped forward and began reciting a poem from Zhivago called 'Hamlet.' As he recited, voice after voice joined in until it seemed the whole crowd was reciting together." With that, Nabokov wound up the conference...
Gradually the prison assumes the aspect of the world-a world in conspiracy to mock the prisoner's hopes and humble his humanity. The prison director's daughter, a kind of pre-Lolita of coquettish innocence, promises to lead him to freedom but never does; the jailers themselves stage an elaborate comedy only to laugh at his false hopes for escape. His past life emerges as a base and saddening farce-his bastard birth, his sluttish wife, his crippled, oafish children who are not really his. And always there is the maddening Alice-in-Wonderland logic by which...
...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: the question of identity...
...always year 1." There is the verbal clowning, e.g., "optimystics," "sexaphone." Wit and humor often sugar-coat horror in Nabokov's novels, but the poignance of exile haunts his pages like a vestigial memory of original sin. From Sebastian Knight to Lolita, Nabokov has sprung ever more fascinating trap doors, and his ambiguous hell, like Sartre's, has no exit...