Word: russianness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...speeding craft. Protected by a heat shield while its descent was slowing, the capsule eventually deployed a parachute and began radioing information about the temperature, pressure and chemical composition of the atmosphere. After 53 minutes of transmission, the capsule's signals abruptly ceased. With no word from the Russians, Western scientists concluded that the intense heat of the lower atmosphere had disabled the transmitters before the capsule crashed. They recalled that in 1967 a similar Russian capsule-Venus 4-had fallen silent after 90 minutes of transmission, just as it was recording a temperature...
Slightly pedantic word play, cultural booby traps, brisk leaps from the Bard of Avon to the Good Ship Lollipop, elegant divertissements for all occasions ?such things can be expected of Nabokov. But that is far from all. Russian by birth, a U.S. citizen who now lives in Switzerland, he has become, at 70, the greatest living American novelist, and the most original writer and stylist since Joyce. He is also an exile, a man who has triumphantly survived this century of the refugee, a man who has lost everything, yet transformed his losses through art and levity into...
...Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Nabokov's latest novel, is already a bestseller. Nabokov's peculiar fascination ?and enduring power?escapes conventional measurement, but by any standard, the range and volume of his work in two languages is prodigious. It includes 15 novels (nine Russian, six English) and translations of other writers' work. His fiction differs from most novels in much the same way that a poem differs from a political treatise. One is an end in itself. The other, however intricate and elegant, is a means to an end. In a classic sneer...
...perfect satisfaction, a purr of beatitude?and a writer may well be proud of himself if he can make his readers, or more exactly some of his readers, smile and purr that way." When as a young man in Berlin, Nabokov decided to translate an English masterpiece into Russian, the book he chose was Alice in Wonderland. Perhaps he knew, even then, that the best way for an artist to triumph over time was to vanish like the Cheshire cat, leaving only a smile behind...
Nabokov's tall, gentle father was an ex-Guards officer who could trace his family tree back to ancient Muscovite princes; he was also a professor of criminal law, and that rarity in Czarist Russia, a liberal politician as well. He held a seat in the first Russian Parliament. In 1906?when Vladimir was seven ?Czar Nicholas II illegally dissolved the Parliament less than a year after its establishment. Nabokov's father signed a manifesto exhorting popular resistance to the move?and went to jail...