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Dear List,
Related to A.Bouazza's comments and Sklyarenko's pertinent question about Brazilian writer Machado de Assis and Nabokov*, an article, written by a recently deceased critic, and re-published at the "Estadão" a few weeks ago, refers to Machado and establishes a peculiar connection between him and Nabokov, in "Lolita."

Wilson Martins greeted this novel ( read in translation, in its 1959 first edition, in Brazil) with enthusiasm. He saw it as a "chef d'oeuvre,"  comparable in genius to Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Joyce's Ulysses, Proust's Recherche... Accordiing to him, Machado de Assis's  writings helped him to appreciate Nabokov's outstanding novel because... and I quote (the limping translation is mine):
 
Like "Brás Cubas," Lolita was written with the "quill of mockery and the inks of melancholy": this mixture of contradictory elements may have surprised non-European and the European critics, and disoriented them. We, who have Machado de Assis ( there is a kind of usefulness in having a Machado de Assis!), were not perplexed by Nabokov's audacities and our road towards understanding them is unimpeded. Nabokov's book is both bitter and sad, a dramatic anguished story which he chose to render with the utmost lucidity, without being carried away by the mystification of a fake gravity and yet, also without excluding such passionate tempests from a normal succession of everyday events... as R.M. Albéres aptly remarked "this particular kind of vision, this mistrust of tartufism, that nervous tick of lucidity," represent some of the aspects that distinguish the so-called "modern" writers from the "traditionalistic"**...
 
 
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* Brás Cubas and Quincas Borba have been mentioned before at the Nab-L, also when Brian Boyd came to Brazil specially invited to read a paper about what points in common Machado and Nabokov might share. He also lectured about his new book, "On the Origin of Stories," at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
 
**Como Brás Cubas, Lolita foi escrita com "a pena da galhofa e a tinta da melancolia": é essa mistura de elementos contraditorios que surpreendeu os criticos europeus (e os não europeus) e os desorientou. A nós outros, entretanto, que possuimos Machado de Assis (para alguma coisa serve ter-se um Machado de Assis!), tais audacias já espantam muito menos e encontram todo aberto o caminho da compreensão. Nabokov escreveu um livro amargo e triste, uma historia dramatica e angustiosa, mas resolveu escrevê-la em toda lucidez, sem deixar-se levar à mistificação de uma falsa gravidade, sem excluir essa tempestade de paixão da linha normal dos acontecimentos cotidianos.