Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...NABOKOV-WILSON LETTERS: 1940-1971 Edited by Simon Karlinsky Harper & Row; 346 pages...
Bunny was Edmund Wilson, the great comparativist from Red Bank, N.J., who foraged ravenously through history, politics, sociology and at least half a dozen acquired languages to give U.S. literary studies an international style. Volodya was Vladimir Nabokov, the great taxonomist of loss from St. Petersburg, Russia, who chased memories of a dispersed culture over two continents and became one of the foremost novelists of the century...
...shortly after Nabokov arrived in New York with his wife and young son. Nabokov had fled Hitler's Europe with little money and few possessions. Even his reputation as the literary star of the Russian emigration was left behind. Wilson did his best to import it. He talked up Nabokov, found him reviewing assignments, advised him about publishers and warned him that puns did not go over with American editors...
Fiction within fiction is an old form, predating Chaucer, Boccaccio and perhaps even Scheherazade, who provided the first law of storytelling: enchant or perish. Author Wain seems familiar with the rewards and risks of laminating two tales. Wain may not achieve the iridescences of Vladimir Nabokov, modern master of the technique, but he moves from one story to the other without draining color from either. One reason is Giles' ability to regard himself as a character. His comments when both he and his fictional doppelgänger love and lose: "He had been able to contemplate the story...
Narrated by Ellellou, deposed and comfortably exiled in the South of France, the story has that sad, ironical tone of dis location found in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. "All their languages were second languages . . . clumsy masks their thoughts must put on," are among Updike's Nabokovian touches...