Word: nabokovs
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...Vladimir Nabokov...
DURING THE EARLY years of the Second World War, Vladimir Nabokov wrote a short story called "The Enchanter," describing a cynical jeweler's predatory lust for an enticing violet-eyed girl of 12. Dissatisfied with the piece, Nabokov abandoned the manuscript. But he continued to ponder over the theme, finally returing to it 10 years later when he wrote Lolita...
...when he becomes excited and voluble, it sounds like the exhaust from a car." He visits W.H. Auden in a completely unheated New York City loft. "Wystan started up some queer kind of little stove, but we sat in our overcoats and our breath went up in vapor." Vladimir Nabokov comes for a visit, and they start arguing about how various English and Russian words should be pronounced. Wilson concludes that the novelist has "something in him rather nasty -- the cruelty of the arrogant rich...
...outstanding phenomenon," master of "sparkling language (and) unexpected metaphors," a real Russian "yearning for his homeland." Could this be the same Vladimir Nabokov, the great Russian-born novelist, whom Soviet authorities had long dismissed for "literary snobbism"? It could indeed, when a Soviet publication, 64 Chess Review, is prompted by today's new, more permissive cultural climate to print an excerpt from Nabokov's 1954 memoir Other Shores with a glowing introduction by Poet Fazil Iskander. So what if Nabokov is nine years dead, his greatest works, including the sensational Lolita, published decades ago? So what that...
...literary bestiary, Flaubert's Parrot is actually a centaur--a splendid hybrid with the scholarly countenance of literary criticism and the powerful headquarters of a good novel. Such crossbreeding of genres is not mythical or even uncommon in 20th century literature--take Nabokov's career, for example, which includes a novel in the guise of an annotated poem. Pale Fire, and a literary biography that's also a comic masterpiece. Nikolai Gogol. What makes Julian Barnes's achievement so remarkable, however, is the sheer lack of artifice and pyrotechnics involved...