Word: nabokovs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...si�cle examples were customarily tainted by a kind of Wildean flounce, or could be made to seem so. More often the doctrine has been propounded to excuse artistic self-indulgence, sheer gush, or at best the refined outpourings of private feeling. None of these excesses apply to Nabokov. Few writers have brought to the practice of art for art's sake?or indeed to thematic literature?the enormous talent and discipline, the overwhelming intellectual grasp, the scrupulously objective range of eye and ear that Nabokov commands...
Distaste for the rational, plodding, message-ridden, rhetorical problem novel?which Nabokov has condemned for years?is now widespread. But the objection to the traditional novel is essentially negative, rising as it often does from despair about the possibilities of rational, orderly, middle-class society. Black comedies, happenings, novels without plots are on the whole grim experiments, and the laughter they offer is at best a kind of comic rictus...
...Nabokov, who is essentially a prose poet, has always had something quite different in mind. "By poetry I mean the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words," he has explained. "True poetry of that kind provokes not laughter and not tears but a radiant smile of perfect satisfaction, a purr of beatitude?and a writer may well be proud of himself if he can make his readers, or more exactly some of his readers, smile and purr that way." When as a young man in Berlin, Nabokov decided to translate an English masterpiece into Russian, the book he chose...
...plot in poetry, T. S. Eliot has compared it to a lump of meat thrown a house dog by a burglar (the writer) to keep him busy while the real business is attended to?rifling the silver cupboard or dealing in the wizardry of words. Nabokov feels the same...
...Nabokov novel is intended not as a message?but as a delight. It is also a game in which the alert reader is rewarded by feelings of wonder at the illusiveness of reality. "In a first-rate work of fiction," he argues, "the real clash is not between the characters, but between the author and the world." Nabokov's books are conceived like the chess problems that he has composed during the past half-century. He describes in an early novel the miraculous way in which a flat, abstract contrivance (in chess or art) can take on vitality and light...