Word: nabokovs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Still, the label that in one sense best suits Nabokov's practice and precept as a writer is art for art's sake...
...inclined to deny that any utility, morality or heavy philosophical meaning should be attributed to his art. He dismisses such suggestions with the same scorn that he once made use of when a clubwoman asked him what butterflies were for. Nevertheless, certain deductions can be drawn from Nabokov's writing. In Bend Sinister, he composed a picture of crude, lumpish evil-in-power, and he put Yeats' much quoted "rough beast" into a Bolshevik or Nazi Bethlehem. Thus Prospero-Nabokov always knew Caliban, whether he was known as Hitler or Stalin or by some other name...
...starts early for Vladimir Nabokov, when the nervy choughs commence kissing outside the sixth floor of the Montreux Palace Hotel. Not that there has been much night for him. "I am the insomniac of universal literature," he cries. "My wet nurse complained. I was always up, smiling and looking around with my bright eyes. I am awakened by my own snore, which is a Nabokovian paradox. Helpful pills do exist, but I am afraid of them. My habitual hallucinations are quite monstrously sufficient, thank Hades. Looking at it objectively, I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced...
Plumed Sunset. Sometimes his wife Vera awakes to furtive noises in the night. It is the mad mind at work shuffling the 3-by-5 cards on which Nabokov now does all his writing, and which he keeps under his pillow for nocturnal reference...
...summer, the hotel and town are crammed with tourists. It is time for the Nabokovs to leave. They do -to a different place every year, chosen for the local lepidoptera. This year it will be Lugano. Nabokov seemingly never tires of saying he may return to the U.S. "Especially in spring," he says, "I dream of going to spend my purple-plumed sunset in California, among the larkspurs and oaks and in the serene silence of her university libraries...