Word: nabokovs
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...Vladimir Nabokov has lived all his adult life as an endangered (and dangerous) species. Woe unto the literary pretender who does not get his facts and grammar straight. Titled men of letters must be particularly careful. Edmund Wilson audaciously questioned Nabokov's Russian and was mauled by return mail. Critic George Steiner was the victim of one of the neatest decapitations in literary history. Responding to a generously appreciative essay, Nabokov wrote that "Mr. Steiner's article ("Extraterritorial") is built on solid abstractions and opaque generalizations. A few specific items can be made out and should be corrected...
...Biographer Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Part must seem like the roughest final exam of his academic life. Field, 39, is a New Jersey-born scholar who now teaches literature at Griffith University in Australia. He has had a working and personal relationship with his subject since the publication of Nabokov: His Life in Art (1967), Field's excellent study of the Russian American's novels and stories...
Alluding discreetly to a few difficult moments, Field allows that his book "does not come with the recommendation of Vladimir Nabokov." There is, after all, the great man's general dislike of biographies, summed up in one word: "Psychoplagiarisms." There is also the autobiography Speak, Memory in which Nabokov has written iridescently of his privileged youth in old Russia and of his stateless years as a penurious emigre in Berlin and Paris...
...Wall's managers and regulars--all bona fide members of Cambridge's bohemian fringe--preferred to think of these shorts as "art films." Art films--you know, the kind Nabokov knew would be worth a few chuckles when he used the term in Lolita, when Lolita tells the lecherous Professor Humbert that she has been to live in an artists' colony in Mexico...
...VLADIMIR NABOKOV...