vladimir nabokov
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The Pleasure of Perfectly Positioned Punctuation
As conscientious writers know, punctuation can make all the difference in a sentence, sculpting mush into meaning or cluing the reader in to nuances of intonation. Vulture’s Kathryn Schulz has compiled some of literature’s most effective and memorable instances of…
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Nabokov vs. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
“When Nabokov started translating [his English-language memoir] into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when he was writing it in English, and so in essence it became a somewhat different book,” Pavlenko says. At…
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The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer
Jason Edward Harrington reviews Andrea Pitzer’s THE SECRET HISTORY OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV today in The Rumpus Book Reviews.
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The Copycat Lolita
A few weeks before Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita came out, the New Yorker published a short story about a man consorting with a young woman named Lolita instead of her mother—but this story was by Dorothy Parker, whose career was entering its last-gasp…
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The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, by Paul Russell
Sibling rivalry takes many forms. Whether it’s Bart and Lisa Simpson choking each other in front of the television or Cain concussing his brother Abel the outcome is usually the same– someone always wins. There’s always a favorite, a golden…
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Nabokov v. Wilson
Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson academically quarrel in a series of letters, written to assuage the pain of illness that was afflicting them both. They’ve got a shared “literary curiosity,” but the specifics of their understanding of Western literature reveal…
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“Writers die twice”
“Writing remains a very interesting job, but destiny, or “fat Fate”, as Humbert Humbert calls it, has arranged a very interesting retribution. Writers lead a double life. And they die doubly, too. This is modern literature’s dirty little secret. Writers…