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| Vladimir Nabokov |
Yesterday
was the birthday of multilingual Russian novelist, poet and short story writer Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. Nabokov's (22 April
1899 – 2 July 1977) first nine novels were in Russian. He also made serious
contributions as a lepidopterist and chess composer. Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is
frequently cited as among his most important novels and is his most widely
known, exhibiting the love of intricate word play and synesthetic detail that characterized
all his works. The novel was ranked at No. 4 in the list of the Modern Library
100 Best Novels. Pale Fire (1962) was ranked at No. 53 on the same list. His
memoir, Speak, Memory, was listed No. 8 on the Modern Library nonfiction list.
Presenting some Quotations : Being Poet
1.
The
evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
2.
If
I were not perfectly sure of my power to write and of my marvelous ability to
express ideas with the utmost grace and vividness.... So, more or less, I had
thought of beginning my tale.
3.
To
a joke, then, I owe my first gleam of consciousness—which again has
recapitulatory implications, since the first creatures on earth to become aware
of time were also the first creatures to smile.
4.
Happy
is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received
when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet
in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
5.
Trees
appeared in groups and singly, revolving coolly and blandly, displaying the
latest fashions. The blue dampness of a ravine. A memory of love, disguised as
a meadow. Wispy clouds—the greyhounds of heaven.
6.
To
minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace: these do not bother
about any reinventing of the world; they merely try to squeeze the best they
can out of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction.
7.
Nowadays,
when Freudism is discredited, the author recalls with a whistle of wonder that
not so long ago—say before 1959 (i.e., before the publication of the first of
the seven forewords to his Englished novels) Ma child's personality was
supposed to split automatically in sympathetic consequence of parental divorce.
8.
Among
the many gifts I showered on Martin, I was careful not to include talent. How
easy it would have been to make him an artist, a writer; how hard not to let
him be one, while bestowing on him the keen sensitivity that one generally
associates with the creative creature; how cruel to prevent him from finding in
art—not an "escape" (which is only a cleaner cell on a quieter
floor), but relief from the itch of being.
9.
We
should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new
world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as
closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious
connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been
closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds,
other branches of knowledge.
10.
The
following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot
who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me.
My
old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship so wholly unrelated to
any question of property. My contempt for the emigre who "hates the
Reds" because they "stole" his money and land is complete. The
nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of
lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
