JM: I had taken the trouble to copy down a few sentences
from Robert Maclean's blogspot to comment upon them later but, in the
end, I decided to quit my self-imposed task, since I'd never be able to do
him justice. Now that Mary H. Efremov brought him up, I decided to
copy the excerpts to post.
They speak for themselves and, I'm sure, they'll confirm
her extremely polite observations concerting the essayist's "derisive
tone", his assumed "superior knowlege" and his "very ecletic
literary judgement."
Excerpts:
"If it weren’t for Lolita we might never have heard of Nabokov, which would
be a huge loss. Success is so often a matter of scandal."[ ..]."I cannot but
acknowledge that the five great novels of the twentieth century are Ulysses, A
la recherche, Gatsby, Under the Volcano and Lolita."[...]"What gives Lolita that
extra thing is the confrontation between a cultured European and the American
vulgarity embodied by Lolita, with whom he is desperately in love. Then too, one
cannot but feel that it's a portrait of Nabokov’s own passion. And passion
delivers. It’s shameless of me to say this—I know nothing of this man’s inner
life—but lust for young girls does emerge elsewhere in his work, and in
Lolita he contributed the word “nymphet” to the English language. It's my
intuition that his stuffed-shirtism, so at home after all in the 1950s, is a
firewall against an unseemly urge. In one of his essays he opines that if the
criminal could only write about the crime he wouldn’t have to commit it. Like
Dostoyevsky, Lewis Carroll and J. D. Salinger he converted the obsession into
literature. Balthus did it in paint"[...]"And English literature—we must have
the courage to face it—is dead."
Excerpts: Professor of English Paul Russell investigates the rich
story of Sergey Nabokov, brother of writer Vladimir Nabokov, in his latest book
The Unreal
Life of Sergey Nabokov: A Nove Famed Russian-American writer
Vladimir Nabokov wrote, "For various reasons, I find it inordinately hard to
speak
about my other brother." Professor of English Paul Russell decided to
investigate the rich story behind Nabokov's words ...Nabokov barely mentions
Sergey in
his autobiography, and in 1915 publicly outed Sergey's
homosexuality..."
JM: Vladimir Nabokov also "barely mentions" his other
brother, Cyril, or his sisters. Although they're all present in his
memoirs, I often get the curious feeling that he was an only child,
perhaps because of the magic manner by which he's
appropriated his childhood-years in Russia.
I remember reading a foreword (or an interview) in which Vladimir
Nabokov describes how he once read his manuscript to his family and how
they responded to it. It's worth looking into since it seems that Nabokov's
subjectivity shines in contrast to the factuality of an
autobiographical report. . .