Subject
Nabokov's U.S. publication and McCarthyism?
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Dear List,
Following SES-EDNote´s to I Dream of Microwaves, "which compares it to VN's
Lolita as an unsettling portrait of America: "On comprend que, un peu comme
dans Lolita de Vladimir Nabokov à qui son humour aussi fait penser, le
véritable sujet du livre, ce sont les Etats-Unis." I was struck about how
often we read about Nabokov as one of the greatests among American writers,
special emphasis being placed in "Lolita" and "Ada" as expressions of VN´s
love and admiration for America, Humbert and Lolita as metaphors for the
encounter bt. the Old and the New Worlds, etc...
Checking the time when 'Lolita' was written (and Pnin, too - such a sweet,
lost very foreign foreigner) against my almost total ignorance of US
history, I noticed that it came out at the height of the McCarthy era when
other writers, as "American as apple-pie", were eyed with suspicion (Hemingway, Faulkner...).
Would this political climate have influenced VN, or at least, his critics
and commentators?
Jansy
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Following SES-EDNote´s to I Dream of Microwaves, "which compares it to VN's
Lolita as an unsettling portrait of America: "On comprend que, un peu comme
dans Lolita de Vladimir Nabokov à qui son humour aussi fait penser, le
véritable sujet du livre, ce sont les Etats-Unis." I was struck about how
often we read about Nabokov as one of the greatests among American writers,
special emphasis being placed in "Lolita" and "Ada" as expressions of VN´s
love and admiration for America, Humbert and Lolita as metaphors for the
encounter bt. the Old and the New Worlds, etc...
Checking the time when 'Lolita' was written (and Pnin, too - such a sweet,
lost very foreign foreigner) against my almost total ignorance of US
history, I noticed that it came out at the height of the McCarthy era when
other writers, as "American as apple-pie", were eyed with suspicion (Hemingway, Faulkner...).
Would this political climate have influenced VN, or at least, his critics
and commentators?
Jansy
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm