Word: nabokovs
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WHEN VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH Nabokov says he writes, ideally, for a lot of little nabokovs, he's not just talking about people who share his eccentric view of "reality" (always in quotes) or his predilection for lepidoptera. To fully appreciate Nabokov's work you need at least a portion of easy brilliance, his fluency in three languages, and his passion for the purest and most pointless play with words. Beyond that, to enjoy his latest novel it helps to have a passing familiarity with his entire oeuvre...
...choice promptly gave rise to complaints. One charge seemed at least plausible. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is expected at the December ceremonies in Stockholm to pick up his 1970 prize and the Swedish Academy did not want his presence to upstage another international figure like Graham Greene or Vladimir Nabokov, for instance...
...Vladimir Vladimirovich." As to his own surname, poor Vadim cannot remember it, though he feels fairly sure it begins with "N" -Naborcroft, he wonders? Nablize? (The experienced reader, meanwhile, notices that Vadim's pseudonym "V. Irisin" sounds a lot like "Sirin," the pen name of one Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, an émigré Russian of illustrious but not aristocratic background who wrote in Berlin, not Paris, after the revolution. This Sirin, Nabokov has been heard to assert, is a writer to be ranked with Pushkin, Tolstoy and Gogol, and well above Dostoyevsky...
...hideous effort swing his entire dream street, post office, taxis, stray dogs and all, 180° around on the axis of his own mad self. Eventually, obsession invades reality. He walks to the end of a real village street, cannot turn, and falls in a paralytic fit. Thus does Nabokov poke dignified fun at himself. The novel is wholly lighthearted, a sunny absurdity that offers a mocking bow to the author's own worst possibilities, unfollowed bad impulses, and uncracked weak spots. His capering in Russian and French seems more playful than usual, and less pointedly designed to exclude...
Fake or Freak. The author has warned that there must be no critical truffling in his works for deep-lying meanings. His word games in Harlequins justify the warning. Butterflies, however, may be chased. Nabokov, for instance, taught at Cornell University after emigrating to the U.S., and his clownish alter ego taught at "Quirn." The Oxford English Dictionary directs the student to "Quern," which derives in its first definition from a variety of languages, including old High German, Swedish and Russian ("Zhernov"), and means "a simple apparatus for grinding corn." The second definition is "a large piece of ice." These...