Hello everyone,

Does anyone here know if Nabokov ever read Svevo's "The Confessions of
Zeno"/his thoughts on Svevo's work?

We had a discussion in a graduate seminar about the similarities in their
writings and a possible influence of Svevo's work on VN's novels. Is there
any evidence that Nabokov was familiar with Svevo's book?

I checked several sources but found nothing.

To quote one of my classmates: "The solid evidence that N was familiar with
Zeno, if it indeed exists, would be found during the times that Joyce had
Svevo's book published in Paris in 1927 and when N himself lived in Paris in
the late 1930s, or in the years following N's move to America, where Zeno
had apparently already been in publication by A.A. Knopf in English since
1930--all of this notably before N began work on Lolita."

Thank you!

 

Yelena