Word: nabokovs
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There are two kinds of people: those who divide things into two categories and those who do not. Vladimir Nabokov is the first kind. In one of his earliest U.S. lectures, the Russian emigre told his classes at Stanford University that there were, essentially, "verb plays and adjective plays, plain plays of action and florid plays of characterization...
...title play, Nabokov examines the somnambulistic life of his fellow wanderers. The plot--a mysterious figure arrives with empty promises of return and recognition--is, as in all the works, secondary. Nabokov, the ultimate gamesman, takes the word play seriously. A coquette demands, "Why don't you say something?" Replies her lover: "Forgot my lines." A woman theorizes, "There were several Lenins. The real one was killed at the very beginning." Another abruptly decides that she is not in love, because "there was no violin...
These interruptions by artifice amount to rips in the backdrop, allowing a glimpse of props and klieg lights. Circumstance and illusion twinkle briefly, then everything is as it was--or is it? Readers of Nabokov's fiction have been here many times before, but it is diverting to imagine the old magician working onstage...
...acters complete the collection. The Pole salutes the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, who perished in the Antarctic. It also celebrates Nabokov's favorite turf: terra incognita. The playwright liked to dream of butterfly-hunting trips to the Caucasus, Mount Elbrus, the Amazon. And he recalled "tingles of delight, of envy, of anguish (when) I watched on the television screen the first floating footsteps of man in the talcum of our satellite and how I despised those who maintained it was not worth all those dollars to walk in the dust of a dead world...
...gate remains closed, as it has always been closed, from the days before the Czars through a history that owes little to the West. As for the new gatekeeper, he will reveal himself when he and the state from which he is inseparable are ready. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov tells of awakening mornings in the Russia of his boyhood and glancing at the chink between the white shutters to see what the new day proffered: gloom or "dewy ( brilliancy." The West has no shutters it can open, and the glimpses it gets show almost nothing. This...