Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...NABOKOV: HIS LIFE IN ART by Andrew Field. 397 pages. Little, Brown...
...Vladimir Nabokov once remarked that the ideal reader for his books would be someone like himself, "a little Nabokov." There may never be one, for it would be hard to match him even in junior size. Besides being a scholar, critic, translator, chess player, lepidopterist and eccentric, he is one of those relatively rare writers who in the midst of their career have been able to alter the language of their craft. Above all, he is a unique artificer in the arid world of contemporary fiction...
...time when so many novelists are merely tinkering with far-out techniques or grinding out hunks of undigested raw material, Nabokov is an artist who fastidiously constructs intricate plots and dazzling verbal mosaics. He creates books without precedent in form (Pale Fire) or treatment (Lolita). He can also be a clever ice skater, stylishly tracing or following someone else's figures-the Conradian Laughter in the Dark, for example, or the Kafkaesque Invitation to a Beheading...
Playboy was spicy but hardly shocking ?long-forgotten efforts by John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Somerset Maugham, Robert Ruark. Playboy also dipped into the ribald classics; despite constant mining, the Boccaccio and De Maupassant vein is still running strong. In the early days, name writers shunned Playboy. Today, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, Herbert Gold, Ray Bradbury and Ken Purdy regularly provide respectable material. This upgrading of fiction is largely due to Auguste Comte Spectorsky,* 56, who was hired from NBC by Hefner to bring some New York know-how and sophistication (a favorite Playboy word) to the magazine...
SPEAK, MEMORY, by Vladimir Nabokov. Robbed of his Russian youth by the Revolution, Novelist Nabokov has tirelessly caressed his memories of it in this autobiography, now published in its final form- a hymn to childhood...