Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Karen." "Well it is a picture of a soup can." "Oh.") But it is greater than Pop Art. Richard Lester is in the tradition. Bob Dylan is part of it; the Bob Dylan that Joan Baez called the Dada King. (Everybody Must Get Stoned.) It includes writers like Nabokov, (or, in another way) Donald Barthelme (Snow White, Come Back Dr. Caligari, Unnatural Practices, Unspeakable Acts), and several New York School Poets (Koch, Ashberry, O'Hara). It includes such Zen masters as Joshu, who was given to putting his shoes on his head in reply to weighty theological questions...
KING, QUEEN, KNAVE by Vladimir Nabokov. The eternal love triangle gets some witty twists in this first English-language edition of a novel written in 1928, when the Russian-born prose master was a 28-year-old emigre living in Berlin...
Flaws v. Foreign. For next season, Papp has scheduled two plays by off-Broadway Negro Playwright Adrienne Kennedy, and has commissioned Negro Actor Ossie Davis and Composer Gait MacDermot to do a contemporary musical on the race question. "I also have," says Papp, "an adaptation of Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. But what I'm really looking for is American plays. I'd rather do flawed American plays than outstanding foreign plays...
...Nabokov lingers over the coincidence of the encounter, but his timing is nearly perfect. By drawing it out, he sharpens the anticipation of the impending adultery; before long, Martha, the frosty doll, and Franz, promoted from lifeless lump to "warm and pliant wax," can't get enough of each other...
Here, as in Nabokov's more sophisticated novels, an important theme is the nature of fiction itself. By putting his comic trio through a series of abstract stances-a modification of the futurist and expressionist influences that swept the arts in the '20s-he never allows the reader to forget that fiction is essentially artifice. In King, Queen, Knave, the artifice may be a little too obvious, but intelligence and wit keep it working smoothly to the end. Nabokov himself could well have been thinking of this "bright brute" when he described a certain variety of butterfly...