Vladimir Nabokov

Nina Khrushcheva’s new book urges Russians to learn from the West by reading Nabokov. James Marson reports.

In the Moscow Times, via A&LD: “Speak, Nabokov”

This belief in the greatness of the Russian soul, Khrushcheva argues, is simply smoke and mirrors used to excuse the country’s backwardness. Russians prefer to fall back on this dreamy myth rather than take responsibility for their own lives. Rational individualism has never taken hold with Russians, and it is instead external forces such as fate and the state that provide meaning to their lives. Living in an idealized, poetic world — “a childish Russian paradise” — they are unable and unwilling to engage in practical activity.

The Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, Khrushcheva writes, offers a way out of this backward state through the example of his own life and his characters. As a member of a wealthy family, he went into exile after the Revolution. His past and country destroyed, Nabokov was forced to rely on himself and create his own meaning for his life.

April 23rd is shared as a birthday by several people of importance to me, one of whom is of the greatest importance of all. :)

First up, in 1564, a certain William Shakespeare who wrote, amongst other famous works, a sonnet which was read at Denyse’s and my wedding:

CXVI
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
  If this be error and upon me prov'd,
  I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

Next up, in 1899, Vladimir Nabokov — my favorite writer. He wrote this:

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

And finally — Denyse, my amazing wife. Our 10th wedding anniversary is coming up in June, and it feels simultaneously like it went by in a flash and like we’ve been together forever. Happy birthday and much love to you, D!

Matthew Cheney over at The Mumpsimus has an intriguing post on one of my favorite books by my favorite writer:

I’ve been subjecting my Advanced Placement students to Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, and it’s been fun to see their responses, because many more of them enjoyed the book than I expected. I introduced it by having them read Azar Nafisi’s memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, which most of them found engaging, and it helped give them a grasp of some of what Nabokov was up to before they plunged into the bewildering world of Cincinnatus C. and his prison cell.

Inevitably, there were students who were convinced Nabokov was insane or a drug addict or both. This accusation comes up all the time when we read anyone who is not among the hardest of hardcore realists, because imagination is something that has come to be associated only with the stimulus of drugs or madness. That someone could think up a story like Invitation to a Beheading — where a man is imprisoned for “gnostic turpitude” in a fortress of porous walls and fake windows and rules against improper dreams — without being addicted to hallucinogens or lacking a couple of screws is at best inconceivable to many people, if not threatening.

Oh the irony.

”[“Reality” is] one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

“I don’t belong to any club or group. I don’t fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.”

— Vladimir Nabokov