Word: nabokovs
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Magical Memories. In nature, beauty is the beast. This is also true in much of Nabokov's fiction. The delectable nymphet Lolita has a cruel, popsicle heart. The exquisite sensibilities of her middle-aged lover Humbert Humbert are grotesquely twisted by lust. Charles Kinbote, whose magical memories feed Pale Fire, is hopelessly mad, as is Luzhin, the chessmaster in The Defense...
With his characteristic self-parodying wit, Nabokov once said: "I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better-balanced mad mind than mine." It was the mind of an exile imprisoned in memories of a culture swept away by revolution and war. Born April 23, 1899, into an intellectual, upper-class St. Petersburg family, Nabokov enjoyed the benefits of wealth, position and a Western European education. English was his first language, taught by an English nanny. French and Russian were learned, as he said, "at my nurses' knees-two nurses, four knees." His mother encouraged his early poetic...
...Nabokov married Vera Slonim, daughter of a Jewish industrialist from St. Petersburg who had also fled the revolution. A son, Dmitri, now an opera singer in Europe, was born in 1934. Five years later, the family sailed for the U.S., where Nabokov soon be gan to feel "as American as April in Arizona." He taught at Wellesley and Cor nell, studied butterflies at Harvard, and published stories in such magazines as Esquire and The New Yorker. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947) earned high praise but few royalties. With the American edition of Lolita...
Scimitars of Anger. A famous and acclaimed Nabokov was stylistically careful but never shy about expressing his views on the modern world that up rooted him. From Switzerland, where he moved in 1959, he flashed scimitars of anger and loosed heavy-hearted outrage at crudities, vulgar sentimentality and artistic pretensions that he lumped un der the termposhlost. The word, Russian for a kind of middle-class tackiness, applied not only to the shibboleths and dashboard saints of popular culture but also to the works of Sigmund Freud - which he saw as an internal totalitarianism - and to the poetry of Ezra...
Politically, Nabokov saw himself as an old-fashioned liberal, though by current standards he was a William F. Buckley conservative. His suggestion that the portrait of a head of government "should not exceed a postage stamp in size" makes good sense in any ideology...