Word: nabokov
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...adolescently incurved back, that ivory-smooth, sliding sensation of her skin through the thin frock.” Of course, such detached precision—each word set down deliberately as a pin through the thorax of a butterfly—was for Nabokov a conscious choice, allowing him to scale ever more crystalline summits. “For me,” he wrote, “a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss...
Walking through Harvard Yard after an English section last fall, another student and I began speculating as to whether any writer had convincingly portrayed the experience of falling in love. Tolstoy developed it too suddenly and Austen privileged convention over emotion. And for Nabokov, love was a clinical affair; a warm body lain on ice. Entomologist, chess-player, master of three languages, and arguably the greatest prose stylist of the 20th century, the ever-meticulous Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov could reach sublime artistic heights, my interlocutor admitted—but who would want to inhabit such chilly...
...structural level is just where his language begins to break down. The thrill of the Nabokovian sentence lies in its intense compression, that hyper-compacted poetry of the apposite adjective or unexpected metaphor that separates it from the more loosely polemical Russian literary tradition. It’s why Nabokov adored Tolstoy’s taut prose and thought Dostoevsky a hack. In “Laura” this compression unravels—degenerating near the end into mere personal notes (“invent tradename, e.g. cephalopium”) and haphazard lists (drawing linkages between self-dissolution...
...absurd introduction seeking to defend the decision, Nabokov’s son Dmitri waxes at turns cloyingly idolizing, stridently resentful, and distastefully self-aggrandizing in his memories of his father. He concludes by asking the question his entire essay has been begging: “But why, Mr. Nabokov, why did you really decide to publish ‘Laura’?” The response: “Well, I am a nice guy, and, having noticed that people the world over find themselves on a first-name basis with me as they empathize with...
...Pnin,” Nabokov once wrote that “the order of the solar spectrum is not a closed circle but a spiral of tints from cadmium red and oranges through a strontian yellow and a pale paradisal green to cobalt blues and violets.” He would have been delighted by the chance findings of an Oregon State grad student this week, who in the process of experimenting with manganese oxide in a 2,000-degree furnace accidentally created a never-before-seen pigment of blue. Reportedly “shocked” at first...