xxx/ellauri124.html on line 238: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire
xxx/ellauri127.html on line 112: When Nabokov died in 1977, The New York Times hailed him as “a giant in the world of literature.” Two of his novels, “Lolita” and “Pale Fire,” landed on the Modern Library’s 1998 list of the best English novels of the 20th century. His legions of fans regard Nabokov’s failure to win a Nobel Prize as one of the great literary travesties of the 20th century.
xxx/ellauri127.html on line 116: There are currently five scholarly journals devoted to Nabokov studies. His allusive style and trilingual (English, French, Russian) wordplay are catnip for academics, who endlessly parse challenging texts like “Pale Fire” — a novel in verse, followed by obscurantist commentary — finding new apercus tailor-made for small-journal publication. Nabokov’s apotheosis in academe is quite ironical, because he and his close friend, the literary critic Edmund Wilson, shared an icy disdain for the ivory tower. They viewed universities as ATMs, handy because there were so many of them, and because they were flush with cash. Nabokov, who arrived in the United States penniless in 1940, had to rely on teaching assignments at Wellesley and Cornell to feed his family for 15 years. The moment “Lolita” made him financially independent, he fled Cornell for Switzerland and never set foot in a classroom again.
xxx/ellauri127.html on line 124: I would argue that the first real fissure in the adulatory critical wall hailing the “literary giant” came in 1990, in George Steiner’s erudite assessment of the first volume of Brian Boyd’s Nabokov biography, “Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years.” Writing in The New Yorker, Steiner perceived, a lack of generosity of spirit in Boyd’s subject: “Nabokov’s case seems to entail a deep-lying inhumanity, or, more precisely, unhumanity,” Steiner wrote. “There is compassion in Nabokov, but it is far outweighed by lofty or morose disdain.”
xxx/ellauri127.html on line 129: I also welcome some reassessments of Nabokov’s appalling personality, which slid deeper and deeper into solipsistic self-reverence as the “Lolita” royalties rolled in.
xxx/ellauri127.html on line 134: Nabokov’s attacks on his fellow Russian novelist Boris Pasternak were anything but amusing. The moment that Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for “Doctor Zhivago” in 1958, Nabokov waged a bitter, personal campaign against Pasternak, a nonstop stream of vitriol.
xxx/ellauri127.html on line 254: The mention (p.289 TAL) of the case abduction and rape of the 11 years old Florence Sally Horner by a 50 years old man. In 1948, the 11-year-old Horner stole a 5-cent notebook from a store in Camden, New Jersey. Frank La Salle, a 50-year-old mechanic, caught her stealing, told her that he was an FBI agent, and threatened to send her to « a place for girls like you« . Then he abducted the girl and spent 21 months traveling with her over different American states and raping her. Florence Horner died in a car accident (p.288 TAL, « a routine highway accident«) near Woodbine, New Jersey, in 1952. It seems clear that the case inspired partly « Lolita » (even though this theme existed long before in Nabokov’s works (see for instance his 1939 work « Volshebnik » (i.e. « The Enchanter« ))).
xxx/ellauri178.html on line 159: This isn’t Nabokov’s ice-blue disdain for the academic ninnyhammers who went snorting after his truffles. Roth, instead, worries himself, as though a sick tooth needed tonguing. He is looking over his shoulder because somebody—probably Irving Howe—might be gaining on him: “This me who is me being me and no other!” as Tarnopol explained at the end of My Life as a Man.
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