Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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DESPAIR by Vladimir Nabokov. 222 pages. Putnam...
...novelist's past has surpassed his present; there is now more old Nabokov around than new. The new Nabokov is represented by the man who has written five novels in English, the old by the Russian émigré, who, cast into exile by the Revolution, wrote eight novels in his mother tongue. Six of these have so far been translated into English, putting the old Nabokov one up on the new. Despair, the sixth, has been published in English twice...
...Nabokov's original translation in 1937 fell upon an indifferent market (he had yet to write Lolita, which was to make him famous). Most of the copies of Despair remained in the London publisher's custody; in 1940 a Luftwaffe bomb reduced them to confetti. Nabokov explains all this in a foreword to this revised translation-also his own -and enters his usual caveat against reading anything into the book that isn't there: "Despair, in kinship with the rest of my books, has no social comment to make, no message to bring in its teeth...
...crime is solved almost at once. Not for a moment does anyone mistake the dead man for his killer. Hiding out in France awaiting arrest, Hermann sets down in his last weeks the narrative that constitutes Nabokov's book, and rages at the perversity of the world, which will not accept at face value-refuses even to recognize-his work of deceptive...
Fops & Frauds. At first glance, the play seems all aglitter with drolly prophetic lights. Gaudy gadgets have indeed become household fixtures, and man seems forever on the verge of blowing the top off his accustomed world. But Nabokov has not simply satirized the pursuit of absolute pleasure and absolute power. His text is fretted with his customary puns, double-entendres, and literary allusions. More important, in the play's final scene Nabokov reveals that Waltz's demonic invention, and his successful rise to power, and-for all the reader knows-most of the fools, fops, frauds, pacifists, pederasts...