Word: nabokovs
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...ambitious law clerk who makes a hilariously premature proposal of marriage to Esther. Sylvia Coleridge is Miss Flite, the daft old regular at Chancery, who collapses one day and tingles with joy at being carried home by "the principals in Jarndyce and Jarndyce." Each takes part in what Vladimir Nabokov described as Dickens' "magic democracy," where even the tiniest characters have a vivid afterlife. This Bleak House, like the London fog of old, is hard to shake. --By Richard Zoglin
This is Andrew Field's third crack at the literary and biographical puzzle that was Vladimir Nabokov. The first, Nabokov: His Life in Art (1967), demonstrated the scholar's grasp of the great man's novels, stories and poems. It was a valuable guide through an intimidating maze of themes and plots; its thoroughness made it a high form of flattery. Field's credo, that a writer's "truest and most palpable biography" is his work, rang with disarming idealism. Nabokov must have been impressed and relieved; his disdain for the genre he defined as "psychoplagiarism" was well known...
...would appear there was more to a writer than his art. Field dutifully charted the course of Nabokov's life: his birth into a distinguished St. Petersburg family; his idyllic, multilingual youth; the Bolshevik Revolution, which stripped the clan of rank and property and launched it into exile. There were Nabokov's university years at Cambridge; his ascension as "Sirin," the pseudonymous literary star of the Russian émigré communities of Berlin and Paris; the coming of World War II; and the flight to America with Wife Vera and Son Dmitri. Colorful details from this period include Nabokov's career...
...retelling this story, Field frequently borrows verbatim from his earlier book. But there are some intriguing additions. His research since Nabokov's death in 1977 has enriched the European period between the wars and provided some naughty parts. The novelist's great-grandmother Nina von Korf continued a love affair with Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist's grandfather, after he became her son-in-law. This, according to Field, accounts for the theme of incest in books like Ada and Lolita, a reversal of family history in which "the man marries the daughter in order to be able to continue more...
After forays into the spheres of law, opera, and racing, Nabokov was finally drawn back to the bewitching allure of his father’s literary legacy...