Subject
VN Mention in the NYTBR (fwd)
Date
Body
From Michael Ignatieff's review of Serge Schmemann's ECHOES OF A NATIVE
LAND: TWO CENTURIES OF A RUSSIAN VILLAGE (Knopf):
" .... Our appetite for lost paradises is insatiable.
The recollection of paradise has produced one masterpiece -- Vladimir
Nabokov's SPEAK MEMORY, a work of genius precisely because its author
mastered the tidal force of his own nostalgia. He did so by forcing his
memory to wrest unmistakably real detail -- the sight of his father
appearing magically in midair in front of a third-story window, lofted up
there by peasants who were tossing him in a blanket -- from the boggy
compost of sentimentality. But where Nabokov led, other have found it
difficult to follow. I know something about the underthrow of
sentimentality and the lure of czarist kitsch, having written one such
memoir myself."
LAND: TWO CENTURIES OF A RUSSIAN VILLAGE (Knopf):
" .... Our appetite for lost paradises is insatiable.
The recollection of paradise has produced one masterpiece -- Vladimir
Nabokov's SPEAK MEMORY, a work of genius precisely because its author
mastered the tidal force of his own nostalgia. He did so by forcing his
memory to wrest unmistakably real detail -- the sight of his father
appearing magically in midair in front of a third-story window, lofted up
there by peasants who were tossing him in a blanket -- from the boggy
compost of sentimentality. But where Nabokov led, other have found it
difficult to follow. I know something about the underthrow of
sentimentality and the lure of czarist kitsch, having written one such
memoir myself."