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I believe Jansy Mello has a good hunch: VN exercised his aesthetic
judgment in regard to Doctor Zhivago – he was amazed to see in BP’s
novel treatment the same motif as in his Lolita: the affair of a mature
man with a teenage girl which messed up all her life, an ambivalent
motif as concerns the question of who is guilty, that is, a motif
escaping a simple moral judgment. VN was firmly wedded to his peculiar
artistic optics through which BP’s novel is simply unreadable. Some
years ago, I delivered a course at Cornell dedicated to these two
novels in order to show that two works linked by a remarkable affinity
and written by two writers of the same generation and culture require
quite different tuning of the reader’s optics which can be developed
only in the process of very attentive reading overcoming preset habits.
Savely Senderovich
Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature & Medieval Studies
Cornell University
103 Morrill Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
USA
Tel.: 607 / 255-1105
Fax: 607 / 254-6051