Word: reals
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Nabokov novel is intended not as a message?but as a delight. It is also a game in which the alert reader is rewarded by feelings of wonder at the illusiveness of reality. "In a first-rate work of fiction," he argues, "the real clash is not between the characters, but between the author and the world." Nabokov's books are conceived like the chess problems that he has composed during the past half-century. He describes in an early novel the miraculous way in which a flat, abstract contrivance (in chess or art) can take on vitality and light...
Nabokov sums up these amorous doings in a mock dust-jacket blurb that closes Ada by describing only the book's most superficial aspects. Long before he gets around to that, though, a suspicion has set in that the surface love story is as different from the real Ada as a bicycle reflector is from a faceted ruby. More even than Lolita and Pale Fire, Ada is studded with assaults and asides directed at literary forms, figures and fashions. Along with its masquerade...
...again, to last, apparently unshadowed, for nearly a decade more. In 1919 (young Vladimir was 20, and had recently inherited the equivalent of $2,000,000 from an uncle), the Bolshevik revolution forced the Nabokovs to begin their flight from Russia with only a few jewels and clothing. The real awareness of tragedy did not fully come home to them until 1922 in Berlin, when a night telephone call informed the family that their father was dead. He had been shot at a political rally, trying to protect another
...human interest criticism." It consists, he once reprovingly wrote oldfashioned, human-interest Critic Edmund Wilson, "of removing the characters from an author's imaginary world to the imaginary, but generally far less plausible, world of the critic, who then proceeds to examine these displaced characters as if they were 'real people.'" He refused to deal in such "dreadful things as trends," or offer traditional chatter about themes and schools of literature. Instead, he performed brilliant, instant autopsies on each book, taking it apart and flinging the pieces on the table, then reassembling them so that students for the first time...
...friend, Harvard Critic Harry Levin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov's first novel written in English, was published. A haunting, accomplished and entirely Nabokovian novel about a man who loses his own identity trying to write the fictional biography of his lost brother, it appeared almost unnoticed. By the time he reached Cornell he had published Bend Sinister (1947), a study of a police state, parts of Speak, Memory, one of the most beautiful autobiographies in English. Yet he was barely known on campus as a man of letters, much less a literary genius...