Word: nabokovs
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...dream it is, and not much of a play either, as adapted by Russell McGrath from a book that the great contemporary novelist, Vladimir Nabokov, wrote in the '30s, called Invitation to a Beheading. As this season's final production of Joseph Papp's Public Theater, it suffers from the dramatic deficiencies common to other people's dreams-the characters are unreal, the tension is nonexistent, and the humor is heavy. So, too, is the symbolism, for which Producer Papp seems to have a weakness, as in his last season's Ergo and The Memorandum...
Invitation to a Hanging--A mixed bag with some style from the New York Shakespeare Festival. The play is adapted from a Vladimir Nabokov novel, the cast includes Joe Bova and John Heffernan, and the director is Gerald Freedman. At the PUBLIC THEATRE, 425 Lafayette...
...poet, though, Pushkin is still very special and-in translation-frustrating. His verse is elusively simple, unadorned by such easily translatable characteristics as splashy imagery or intellectual abstractions. Its strength lies rather in subtly suggestive tones and rhythms. No less a language snob and stylist than Vladimir Nabokov labored on and off for almost a decade to translate Pushkin's acknowledged masterpiece, the verse novel Eugene Onegin. Nabokov's rendering of this romantic (and mock romantic) panorama of Russian society was brilliant; yet even he decided to settle for strict literalism rather than attempt to re-create...
...also as playful as a small boy, a trait that sometimes results in childishly prankish writing, atrocious puns and sub-college humor. Yet along with the impishness runs a strand of poignance and melancholy, a nostalgia for the paradise lost of childhood, quite possibly inspired by Nabokov's enforced early exile from his native Russia...
With his monstrous inventions, Nabokov seems to say, man has expelled himself from the Eden of Nature. Waltz rules the world but loses the girl who had captured his love when she told him who had lived on the mountain top he had blown up - ";an old enchanter and a snow-white gazelle." At play's end, the humiliatingly real interview with the Minister of War takes place and Waltz is hauled off to the madhouse...