Word: russianness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...series of nannies and governesses assisted his mother in teaching Vladimir to speak and read English (before he could read Russian). Tutors and coaches turned Nabokov into a competent boxer and a skilled tennis player?good enough, in fact, so that later, in straitened exile, he helped pay his way by giving lessons. More or less on his own he became an expert at chess problems and a collector of butterflies...
...liberal school expressly chosen by his father, he resented a master's suggestion that the Nabokov coachman deposit him several blocks away so he could arrive at class democratically afoot. A more galling comment, though, came from teachers who accused him of "showing off?mainly for "peppering my Russian papers with English and French terms which came naturally...
First at Stanford, then for seven years as a part-time lecturer in the Russian language at Wellesley, with side jobs as a lepidopterist in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology (plus a few more tennis lessons), and finally as a professor at Cornell from 1948 to 1958, Nabokov studied America, as a colleague at Cornell puts it, like someone "in Madagascar observing the natives." In 1945 he became an American citizen. They occupied a succession of rented houses?more or less bivouacked in the quarters of a different absentee professor each year ?partly for lack of cash, partly...
...Russian Scrabble. The meal ends, always the same way. Nabokov empties his pockets of silver, apparently at random. Alone of the regulars, he tips at each meal. "You don't know the laws that govern my life," he sighs humbly, looking heavenward. Now there is time for more serious talk, but Nabokov is reluctant to discuss The Novel...
...path. Yet her real role, one senses, is not in these labors, but as the only confidante of that "lucid, lonely mind." In the summer, they walk as much as 15 miles a day together. In the evening, they play out their Scrabble tournaments, often with a Russian set (he can run up a 500 score). The chess problems he eventually publishes are set first for her to solve. They like to read to each other. They reread War and Peace in a motel in Montana a few years ago, and sad to say, Tolstoy flunked. " 'He paled slightly...