Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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PHONY, kitch and camp are examples of a useful phenomenon: every so often a word breezes into common usage meaning many things and weaving together previously unrelated objects into a new category. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov offers a new word, poshlost (pronounced push-lost). In Russian it means vulgarity or triteness, but in an interview with Author Herbert Gold in the current Paris Review, Nabokov so expands the definition that it makes one wonder how the English language ever got along without...
Numerous contemporary writers obviously produce poshlost or are, for other reasons, Nabokov's black pets. "Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as 'great literature' by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced...
...NABOKOV: HIS LIFE IN ART, by Andrew Field. This intelligent if somewhat unyielding study of all Vladimir Nabokov's literary production firmly consolidates his claim to succeed James Joyce as the Old Artificer of English...
...NABOKOV: HIS LIFE IN ART, by Andrew Field. This intelligent if somewhat unyielding study of all Vladimir Nabokov's literary production firmly consolidates his claim to succeed James Joyce as the Old Artificer of English...
...NABOKOV: HIS LIFE IN ART, by Andrew Field. Though his performance as critic is generally excellent, Field contributes mainly an engrossing review of Nabokov's entire career-in Russian and English-and finds the roots of such masterpieces as Lolita and Pale Fire...