Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0004054, Mon, 10 May 1999 11:38:16 -0700

Subject
Re: Nabokov Quote (fwd)
Date
Body
From: Kristen Welsh <kristen.welsh@yale.edu>

Hello--

"The Art of Literature and Commonsense." Bibliographic information from
the version I have:

_Lectures on Literature_, ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt, Brace
1980. p. 372.

I note one difference between my version and that given below: "...for in
the natural _evolution_ of things..."

--Kristen Welsh
kristen.welsh@yale.edu

> On 10 May 1999, Carmela Cangialosi wrote:
>
> >
> > I am a corporate librarian and I am trying to locate the source of a
> Nabokov quotation that our chairman is using in a speech.
> >
> > This is the quote we want to find:
> >
> > Let us bless the freak; for in the natural order of things, the ape
> > would perhaps never have become man had not a freak appeared in the
> > family. Anybody whose mind is proud enough not to breed true, secretly
> > carries a bomb at the back of his brain; and so I suggest, just for
> > the fun of the thing, taking that private bomb and carefully dropping
> > it upon the model city of commonsense.
> >