Word: russian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Vladimir, the loss went far deeper than confiscated rubles and country estates. As a budding Russian poet, he was deprived of the roots of his language...
...passport was his art. When he died last week at 78, of a viral infection, at a hospital near his home in Montreux, Switzerland, that art was widely considered to include some of the best novels of the 20th century. There are three masterpieces: The Gift, written in Russian and first published in 1936, Lolita (1955), and Pale Fire (1962). In addition to 14 other novels, hundreds of poems, dozens of short stories, dramas, translations, criticism and scientific articles about butterflies, Nabokov produced one of the finest autobiographies in the English language. First published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence...
...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 efforts, and his father, a distinguished liberal jurist during the final reactionary years of imperial Russia, set an example of scholarship and courage...
This sense of linguistic homelessness is evident throughout his work, but most poignant in the poem "An Evening of Russian Poetry" ("Beyond the seas where I have lost a scepter,/ I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns...
...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 Pound, whom he called "that total fake...