Word: nabokovs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...here" is not only the hotel in Switzerland where Nabokov makes his home, but the rarefied, almost Jamesian air of Meisterschaft which has grown up about him in the last few years. He is the one clear, current giant of our literature, I mean of American literature and English literature in general, and it is there, in language itself, that he has been most at home, since leaving Russia at 20, Western Europe at 40, and America for Europe again...
That may be the reason why, as Nabokov explains in the preface to Strong Opinions, the interviews which make up the bulk of the book all consist of written answers to written questions. Suspicious of alterations in phrase or context, he refuses to give interviews "off the Nabocuff." He rejects the illusions of "bogus informality" and "colorful details." He has made sure that his words are bright and fresh, as crisp and carefully re-written, in the interviews, letters to the editor, and critical pieces assembled in Strong Opinions, as they always are in his novels...
...Nabokov is a cultivator of vocabulary. And it will not seem too paradoxical--not, at least, to a reader of Nabokov--to say that a non-bogus, paraphrased, uncolorfully detailed Nabokov told me last summer on his Montreux veranda that he had always emphasized his status as an American writer because America has the richest vocabulary in history, graced with an unparalleled number of technical terms and vigorous, constantly changing slang. Even its cliches are at the highest level. That is why, in Nabokov's opinion, the best writing in progress today is being done by Americans...
...Nabokov values such a vocabulary so much because he had to struggle so long without it. His story is a rich relative of that of the classic first-generation immigrant who loves America because he doesn't want to leave it. Nabokov has left it, still loves it. He feels very sensitive, he says in Strong Opinions, about his lack of a natural vocabulary. He echoes what he said in the afterword to Lolita: My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom, my rich...
...most useful revelations of Strong Opinions is of the way Nabokov thinks in images, not words, during the first stage of writing. In his brilliant piece on "Inspiration," he describes how Ada took form from a single inspired, Iyric section that gave tone and texture to the whole book. Writing the book means approximating in the best words available something that already exists in a mental realm from which Nabokov rescues, recreates, excavates it. A subtle relation between levels of possibility--in thought and in vocabulary--participates in the creation of the words that firmly but transparently exist there...