Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...DEFENSE by Vladimir Nabokov. 256 pages. Putnam...
That prominent lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov is a busy but exceedingly thrifty man. During the past decade, in between chasing butterflies, translating Pushkin (TIME, July 31), and writing his brilliant, cross-grained fiction, he has been bringing to market carefully supervised English translations of his own early novels, which he wrote in Russian in the days when he was a member of the Czarist émigré community in Berlin and Paris. Several of these translations, notably 1963's version of The Gift (his last Russian novel), have displayed the unmistakable Nabokov wit and sardonic inventiveness. The Defense...
...Defense is Nabokov's version of one of the most dependable items (almost as obligatory as the one about a tuberculosis sanitarium) in the repertory of the young European romantic after World War I. It is the story of a genius chess player who is at last driven insane by his obsession with the game. Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin is an unappealing, neurasthenic child who finds refuge from an incomprehensible world in the ordered clarity of the chessboard. The child prodigy grows to be a grand master and to play for the world championship-only to crack up from fatigue...
EUGENE ONEGIN, by Vladimir Nabokov. Novelist-Scholar Nabokov has rendered Alexander Pushkin's highly romantic 19th century novel-in-verse with greater accuracy and range of meaning than any previous translation. By contrast, his volumes of notes show Nabokov as an obsessive genius of the species that he kidded so guilefully in his novel Pale Fire...
EUGENE ONEGIN, by Vladimir Nabokov. Novelist-Scholar Nabokov has translated Alexander Pushkin's 19th century novel-in-verse with accuracy and range of meaning closer to the original than any previous version. By contrast, his volumes of notes show Nabokov as an obsessive genius in action-a side of himself that he kidded in his brilliant academic satire, Pale Fire...