Comments on: There are no dead http://thelongestchapter.com/2009/08/05/the-original-of-laura/ Literary fiction, poetry, first editions, classics... Fri, 27 Jan 2012 03:05:33 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: S- http://thelongestchapter.com/2009/08/05/the-original-of-laura/#comment-38 Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:39:24 +0000 http://thelongestchapter.com/?p=1455#comment-38 I thought this was an interesting comment [from the Random House/Knopf website author spotlight]: “Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: ‘My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions–which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.’ [p. 317] Yet Nabokov’s American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, ‘Bend Sinister’ (1947), ‘Lolita’ (1955), ‘Pnin’ (1957), and ‘Pale Fire’ (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.”

..thoughts?
Possibly one should learn French or Italian and read in the language ..Reminds me of Paul …

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