Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Vladimir Nabokov wrote a play called The Waltz Invention in 1938. More in the spirit of a dizzy gamble than of a calculated risk, the Hartford Stage Company has now given the drama its be lated professional world premiere. The play itself is deeply flawed, only fitfully flaring into zany, poignant and prophetic life. Though it will try some playgoers' patience and mystify others, admirers of Nabokov can scarcely fail to find it oddly fascinating...
...little like discovering the prehistoric ruins of a writer before he has built the edifices on which his reputation rests. One must bring to the play more than the play can possibly bring on its own: a knowledge of Nabokov's prevailing predilections. The most fundamental of these is that Nabokov has always regarded writing as an act of magic, of conjuring up rather than noting down, of producing totally unexpected rabbits from nonexistent hats...
...also as playful as a small boy, a trait that sometimes results in childishly prankish writing, atrocious puns and sub-college humor. Yet along with the impishness runs a strand of poignance and melancholy, a nostalgia for the paradise lost of childhood, quite possibly inspired by Nabokov's enforced early exile from his native Russia...
With his monstrous inventions, Nabokov seems to say, man has expelled himself from the Eden of Nature. Waltz rules the world but loses the girl who had captured his love when she told him who had lived on the mountain top he had blown up - ";an old enchanter and a snow-white gazelle." At play's end, the humiliatingly real interview with the Minister of War takes place and Waltz is hauled off to the madhouse...
...whom most people consider the most accomplished novelist in English, Vladimir Nabokov, will publish his first new book since Pale Fire. Called Ada, it is Delphically described by the author as "an attempt to grapple with the problem of time." Saul Bellow, the man whom most of the other people consider the most accomplished novelist in English, has a new novel too. Like his bestselling Herzog, it will deal with urban intellectuals, more than ever a promising subject since Norman Podhoretz's Making It made...