Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Vladimir Nabokov...
DURING THE EARLY years of the Second World War, Vladimir Nabokov wrote a short story called "The Enchanter," describing a cynical jeweler's predatory lust for an enticing violet-eyed girl of 12. Dissatisfied with the piece, Nabokov abandoned the manuscript. But he continued to ponder over the theme, finally returing to it 10 years later when he wrote Lolita...
...this time, "The Enchanter" had changed into the complex tale of the love affair between the brooding Humbert Humbert and his spunky nymphet. As Nabokov put it, the original short story "had, in secret, grown the claws and wings of a novel...
...when he becomes excited and voluble, it sounds like the exhaust from a car." He visits W.H. Auden in a completely unheated New York City loft. "Wystan started up some queer kind of little stove, but we sat in our overcoats and our breath went up in vapor." Vladimir Nabokov comes for a visit, and they start arguing about how various English and Russian words should be pronounced. Wilson concludes that the novelist has "something in him rather nasty -- the cruelty of the arrogant rich...
...outstanding phenomenon," master of "sparkling language (and) unexpected metaphors," a real Russian "yearning for his homeland." Could this be the same Vladimir Nabokov, the great Russian-born novelist, whom Soviet authorities had long dismissed for "literary snobbism"? It could indeed, when a Soviet publication, 64 Chess Review, is prompted by today's new, more permissive cultural climate to print an excerpt from Nabokov's 1954 memoir Other Shores with a glowing introduction by Poet Fazil Iskander. So what if Nabokov is nine years dead, his greatest works, including the sensational Lolita, published decades ago? So what that...