Word: nabokovs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Nabokov's own grasp of the organic union between world and world, between observation and inspiration, goes back...
...decades between Cambridge and World War II, three pieces of great good fortune befell Nabokov. In 1925 he married Vera Evseena Slonim, the slim and beautiful daughter of a Jewish St. Petersburg industrialist also ruined by the revolution. In 1934 they had a son, Dmitri, an only child now studying opera in Italy. In 1939, having moved from Berlin to Paris to avoid the Nazis, Nabokov quite by chance received and accepted a proposal to lecture on Slavic languages at Stanford...
Life in California freed Nabokov of the need to write in the bathroom. But he needed all his astonishing powers of concentration and creative effort for the challenge now facing him. "It had taken me some 40 years to invent Russia and Western Europe," he wrote of the problem, "and now I was faced by the task of inventing America...
First at Stanford, then for seven years as a part-time lecturer in the Russian language at Wellesley, with side jobs as a lepidopterist in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology (plus a few more tennis lessons), and finally as a professor at Cornell from 1948 to 1958, Nabokov studied America, as a colleague at Cornell puts it, like someone "in Madagascar observing the natives." In 1945 he became an American citizen. They occupied a succession of rented houses?more or less bivouacked in the quarters of a different absentee professor each year ?partly for lack of cash, partly...
...teacher, Nabokov was provocative, tough, highhanded. At Wellesley, anxious to get off on a June butterfly hunt, he startled the registrar's office by wanting to turn in his grades before the final exam. He already knew, he said, exactly what each of his students was worth. When he did give an exam, it was demanding. Appalled by the constant cheating, he browbeat students to go to the toilet before the papers were passed out and pressed fresh pencils into the hands of examinees rather than let them go to the sharpener...