Word: nabokovs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...collective storage system of a tribe. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who knows something of the totalitarian uses of language, has said that he studies the words in his Russian dictionary "as if they were precious stones, each so precious that I would not exchange one for another." Another Russian exile, Vladimir Nabokov, has the same curator's love of words...
...question will always remain how much his political buoyancy affected his music. As his contemporary Vladimir Nabokov pointed out, it is a wretched thing for an artist to leave his homeland and his native sounds, whether musical or verbal. Perhaps because Shostakovich had to bend his inspiration to the will of the state, the quality of his work varies widely. There are, however, his passages of genuine beauty, crisp wit and sheer energy of genius. For those, it is impossible to name a successor...
...Vladimir Nabokov made the list; Norman Mailer did not. Betty Ford is among the elect, but Jerry is missing. The New York Times qualifies, but not the Washington Post...
...bridges over C.P. Snow's famous "gulf of mutual incomprehension" that lies between the technical and literary cultures. The late Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man) was a devotee; Poet W.H. Auden constantly quoted from Gardner's work. In his novel Ada, Vladimir Nabokov pays a twinkling tribute by introducing one Martin Gardiner, whom he calls "an invented philosopher...
...delights in Freudian analysis of typographical slips of the finger, and points out tiresome puns at every opportunity. He even plays word golf, like Nabokov's Kinbote, only not as well: Golf, gold, good, gods, nods, nous, gnus, anus, Amos. "Eight strokes with some cheating and a one putt." It is as if Updike has been suppressing all this game-playing for years as self-indulgent and inappropriate, and now he has discovered the perfect way out--he can pin it on Marshfield in the name of character development...