Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Shade's work: he has absorbed Kinbote's theories and has fashioned the commentary as an extravagant coda to his own poem. This kind of argument about a possible fiction within a fiction -essentially, the was-Hamlet-reallymad type of argument-may seem academic to all but Nabokov's most devoted readers. But it testifies to the extraordinary reality that Nabokov imparts to his artificial world...
...Nabokov's achievements fully merit a major critical study. Andrew Field, a New Jersey-born critic now teaching Russian literature at the University of Queensland in Australia, microscopically analyzes all 15 Nabokov novels and the major short stories and poems, and traces Nabokov's abiding themes-love, death, exile and memory-through his Russian and American books...
Novel of Prisons. As an exile in Germany from the Russian Revolution, Nabokov commanded a relatively tiny public in emigre circles. When he went to America before World War II, he painstakingly learned every nuance of English and translated his works back and forth in an effort to find a wider audience. He achieved notoriety before legitimate fame in 1958 with Lolita, and Field argues that the book, in which 42-year-old Humbert Humbert lusts for a child of twelve, would not have shocked nearly so much if readers had understood Nabokov's deeper preoccupations...
Lolita, says Field, "is a novel of prisons." The idea for it came to Nabokov from a Paris newspaper account of a monkey who, "after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." Humbert Humbert is a prisoner of lust. He imprisons first Lolita, then his deadly rival Quilty. Later he writes his memoirs from prison. For Nabokov, the book's theme is love-and the necessity to liberate love from "its extreme and seemingly mutually exclusive opposite, lechery." Eventually...
Dotty Commentary. Nabokov's twin loves, says Field, are art and words. There are artists in virtually all his books, usually failed or mad artists. More often his heroes are demented chess players, professors, homosexuals, murderers. Writes Field: "Madness and art are always in each other's presence in Nabokov's prose," because the demands of art and life are incompatible...