Word: nabokovs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...NABOKOV'S DOZEN, by Vladimir Nabokov (214 pp.; Doubleday; $3.50), follows Lolita, the cannon shot heard round the literary world (TIME, Sept. 1), and by comparison crackles sporadically like sniper fire. But since Nabokov is an accomplished literary marksman, these short stories are on target, and several are bull's-eyes. The targets are strikingly varied: a pair of Siamese twins, each of whom must be his brother's keeper; a frustrated lepidopterist; a White Russian general playing triple agent in the Paris of the '205. The unifying theme, if there is one, is that...
...recurrent suicide attempts has succeeded. "That in Aleppo Once . . ." tells of a Russian emigré torn from the girl he married "a few weeks before the gentle Germans roared into Paris.'' One story. First Love-"true in every detail to the author's remembered life"-links Nabokov to an episode in the life of the notorious Humbert Humbert, Lolita's nymphet-chasing hero. In the story, the narrator is smitten by a cute little nymphetease on the beach at Biarritz-but it is only a poignant little saga of puppy love quickly brought...
...Nabokov is resigned to the idea that Lolita will be attacked on moral grounds, but he humorously questions the moral standards of at least some U.S. publishers. One firm, he notes, offered to publish the book three years ago if he turned Lolita from a girl into a boy-homosexuality presumably being much more acceptable than nymphet-mania...
Silence in the Street. Some critics will reach for their nearest Dostoevsky, but Nabokov himself disdains comparison with the other Russian, whom he regards as a clumsy and vulgar writer. Yet, the suppressed criminal episode in Dostoevsky's' The Possessed invites analogy with Lolita. Stavrogin, Dostoevsky's moral monster, seduced an innocent. The difference is that Stavrogin told of his crime to prove he was capable of it; Nabokov's character tells his agonized story to show that he was incapable of not committing it. In Nabokov's world, crime is its own punishment...
...absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord." Thus it was when James Joyce's hero Stephen stood in the school study listening to the voices of boys at play. "That is God,'' said Stephen, "a shout in the street." Nabokov also seems to be asserting that all of creation is God, and that Humbert, listening in vain for the laughter of a child, knew it at the bitter...