Vladimir Nabokov) explores a remarkable literary partnership-that of a woman who devoted her life to her husband's art and a man who dedicated his works to his wife. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage, by Stacy Schiffīuy online WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE “Without my wife,” Vladimir Nabokov once noted, “I wouldn't have written a single novel.”Īt once a love story, a portrait of a marriage, and an answer to a riddle, Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage Véra (Mrs. The emotion and pain in that novel was communicated by indirection, because he despised “cant, rant, gibberish and jargon.Home / Books and Essays by Stacy Schiff / Véra (Mrs.
That final irony of her life, dropped in almost as an aside, was chilling. His heroine of that novel, Lolita (Dolores Haze) was a young girl, who survived terrible abuse only to die tragically in child birth. His work was rooted in that pain and loss, but disguised, re-presented. Nabokov’s deepest pain was related to the loss of his Country to the Revolution, the loss of his Russian context and native language as his art form, and the loss of his beloved Father shot to death by an obsessed mad-man (also echoed in Pale Fire). We see these flawed narrators most prominently in Despair, Laughter in the Dark, Pale Fire, and Lolita. This was his technique of representational art as a distorted mirror. In many of his books he used as the narrator of the story characters who he saw as obsessed mad-men, preying on our sympathies. Nabokov sent Humbert to the Hell where he belonged for his total obsession, for destroying that young girl’s life. Nabokov clearly stated that he wrote Lolita as a “love affair with the English Language.” There is this belief that Nabokov was referring to Lolita and Humbert as his “love story.” The truth is exactly the opposite. Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Vladimir Nabokov’s Delightful Butterfly Drawings Vladimir Nabokov Creates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses The Notecards on Which Vladimir Nabokov Wrote Lolita: A Look Inside the Author’s Creative Process Vladimir Nabokov Marvels Over Different “Lolita” Book Covers Vladimir Nabokov (Channelled by Christopher Plummer) Teaches Kafka at Cornell Should you hang in there for the next clip, you will hear Nabokov read from his notebook titled “Things I Detest.” How seriously we are to take any of this is hard to say-one never really knows with Nabokov. So there you have it, from the mouth of the master himself. Nonetheless, after his takedown of such venerated names as Thomas Mann, Boris Pasternak, and the “corncobby” William Faulkner, Nabokov doesn’t hesitate to name his “greatest masterpieces of 20th century prose.” They are, in this order:Ĥ) The first half of Proust’s fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time
That Lolita regularly tops such “great books” lists, such as the Modern Library’s “100 Best Novels,” would hardly have impressed its author. I’ve been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called “great books.” That, for instance, Mann’s asinine Death in Venice, or Pasternak’s melodramatic, vilely written Doctor Zhivago, or Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles can be considered masterpieces, or at least what journalists term “great books,” is to me the same sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. In a Paris Review interview, he opines that the only purpose of literary criticism was that it “gives readers, including the author of the book, some information about the critic’s intelligence, or honesty, or both.” In the filmed interview above (at the 3:24 mark), Nabokov points his lance at the inflated popular notion of “great books”: The author had little regard for critics themselves.
Or rather, Nabokov, the critic of critics. Then, after a few minutes of discussion of a work that became incorporated into his Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, we get Nabokov the cantankerous critic. Just above, hear émigré Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita read the opening sentences of that novel in both English and Russian, after offering some brief comments on his relationship to his former native country.
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