Word: vera
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Nabokov experts. Contributing Editor Mark Vishniak, a member of the magazine's Russian Desk since 1946, knew Nabokov's father in Petrograd. The families fled the country together in 1919. Later, in Paris, Vishniak edited a Russian quarterly that published young Vladimir's early novels. Researcher Vera Kovarsky, who also escaped to France with her family during the Russian Revolution, remembers Nabokov from literary evenings in Paris. Contributing Editor Alwyn Lee met the novelist in 1958, when he wrote TIME'S highly laudatory review of Lolita...
...decades between Cambridge and World War II, three pieces of great good fortune befell Nabokov. In 1925 he married Vera Evseena Slonim, the slim and beautiful daughter of a Jewish St. Petersburg industrialist also ruined by the revolution. In 1934 they had a son, Dmitri, an only child now studying opera in Italy. In 1939, having moved from Berlin to Paris to avoid the Nazis, Nabokov quite by chance received and accepted a proposal to lecture on Slavic languages at Stanford...
...entertained sparingly and cared only to see a few close friends. They were too busy. Besides, science (lepidopterology) was once again coming to the aid of Vladimir's art. Its handmaiden was technology in the form of a 1952 Buick, bought mainly to search for specimens in the West. Vera did the driving. Nabokov, with the security of a man who is good at nearly everything, easily concedes he cannot handle a car, adding generously, "There are some people who can refold maps, too, but I am not one of them." Every summer they coursed up and down Arizona, Utah...
...Humbert's sad obsession with twelve-year-old Dolores Haze went off in the U.S. of the late '50s like a shot in church. At first, U.S. publishers were afraid to touch it. Vera was afraid Nabokov might lose his job at Cornell if they did. When it finally came out, reviewers, not yet used to such material in "serious literature," flew into rages of indignation and feigned boredom. New York Times Critic Orville Prescott, in particular, earned a gargoyle's niche in literary history by exclaiming, "Dull, dull, dull." But Lolita in due course was recognized as the masterpiece...
...movie while his mind was on something else-probably quitting time. Katharine Ross, Dustin Hoffman's sidekick in The Graduate, plays Duke's daughter with an understandable lack of enthusiam. A few more parts like this and she'll be about as well remembered as Vera Hruba Ralston...