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1 - Strong opinions and nerve points

from Part I - Contexts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Julian W. Connolly
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Summary

I imagined, in bedtime reveries, what it would be like to become an exile who longed for a remote, sad, and (right epithet coming) unquenchable Russia, under the eucalipti of exotic resorts. Lenin and his police nicely arranged the realization of that fantasy . . .

Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 177

[S]ome part of me must have been born in Colorado, for I am constantly recognizing things with a delicious pang.

Vladimir Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, July 24, 1947 (NWL, 218)

More than any other twentieth-century writer whose travel agents inadvertently included Lenin and Hitler, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was concerned with discerning thematic designs in his life and encoding across his works “the fantastic recurrence of certain situations” (Pnin, 159 [ch. 6]). Once Lolita made him a celebrity, he used his public prose to direct his readers toward those prescient designs and to suggest that historical exigency was merely a tool for the materialization of his fantasy. His interviews, prefaces, postscripts, letters to various editors, and responses to his critics always strike me as pre-emptive and corrective, at once recapitulative and predictive. They chide, they nudge, they set the story straight, and they do so not by informing but by evoking.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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