Word: nabokovs
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Novelist Vladimir (Bend Sinister) Nabokov, 57, himself an émigré Russian and a Cornell professor of Russian literature, does more than sound-track his hero for laughs; in unobtrusive flashbacks he captures the underlying pathos of exile. Leafing through an émigré journal, Pnin sees his dead father and mother in the lamplit serenity of their pre-Revolutionary home; stonily viewing a Soviet documentary film, he bursts into tears at a sudden glimpse of the Russian countryside in springtime...
...consulted an out-of-date timetable. Bent on being a sports-minded pal to a schoolboy visitor, he remarks chummily that the first description of tennis in Russian literature "is found in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's novel, and is related to year 1875." Whenever Pnin stops talking, Novelist Nabokov steps in with waspish, high-spirited asides on U.S. higher education, culture vultures and modern art ("Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnaped by gypsies in babyhood"). For the rest, Pnin's centripetal personality holds this novel together, and his centrifugal English keeps the laughs flying...
Unlike Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov learned English at his English governess' knee. His family belonged to the landed Russian aristocracy, but his liberal-minded father gave up his position at the Tsar's court, sardonically advertised his court uniform for sale, later was assassinated by Russian monarchists. As a refugee from the Revolution, Vladimir worked for a Cambridge degree, lived in France and Germany, wrote eight novels in Russian...
Since coming to the U.S. in 1940, Nabokov has divided his time among teaching, lepidopterology (he is a professional collector with several unique butterfly specimens to his credit) and a brilliant new literary career in which he has evolved a vivid English style which combines Joycean word play with a Proustian evocation of mood and setting...
...Nabokov is in the strange position of a man whose career is leading a double life, for the most remarkable demonstration of his fictional powers is a novel virtually unknown in the U.S. or abroad. As dark and demoniac as Pnin is gentle and sunlit, this novel has in the past year become a sotto voce scandal on two continents. Lolita, published in English by France's Olympia Press, gives the pornography-v.-art debate its most combustible tinder since Judge Woolsey handed down his famed decision on Ulysses...