Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Classed as a black humorist in the '50s, Barth was hailed as a fabulist in the '60s. He was actually becoming a school of one. Following hints in his own work and examples out of Beckett, Borges and Nabokov, he evolved assumptions that increasingly governed his fiction. Among them: the number of stories to tell is finite and dwindling; print has been rendered passe by film and electronics; realism is an irrational goal for the writer (What is real? Whose reality is it?); art rehashes art. Barth's response was to exalt artifice and make telling...
...girls were dainty untouchables, unless they were little mutts. Hollywood had a Latin view of them, the whore or the madonna." If a script called for a very young girl to play a suggestive role, directors looked around for slightly built older actresses. When the film version of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita appeared in 1962, it was considered scandalous that Sue Lyon, a not particularly slight 14 when she was selected for the role, was so young. Actually she was old to play the part, because Nabokov's Humbert Humbert was fascinated by seductive little girls only until they reached...
...Nabokov-Wilson Letters 1940-1971, edited by Simon Karlinsky...
...Nabokov's high spirits and intellectual playfulness were both amusing and rankling to Wilson. The American's ideas about important literature leaned more toward social and political content than art for art's sake. Nabokov demurred, but his answer was not frivolous: "The longer I live the more I become convinced that the only thing that matters in literature is the (more or less irrational) shamanstvo of a book, i.e., that the good writer is first of all an enchanter...
...fiction writer, Wilson's eye was quicker than his hand. He would never equal Nabokov's magic. Yet, like most of the intellectuals of his time, Wilson was fascinated by all things Russian. He had written sympathetically about Lenin and the Soviet Revolution in To the Finland Station and had, at the time of his first meeting with Nabokov, added the aristocratic newcomer's language to his long list of merit badges...