Subject:
Dmitri - a slippery Nabokovian ...
From:
"Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Date:
Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:54:44 -0400
To:
"Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>

 
Haaretz israel news English
 
 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1115410.html 
 
Last update - 21:46 17/09/2009
Mr. Nabokov is not in his room
By Doron Rosenblum
Tags: Nabokov, Israel News


 
"Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name"

- Vladimir Nabokov

Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Mon-t-reux. The mouth puckers and the tip of the tongue brushes the palate, gently tapping the teeth before releasing a rolling r toward lips that pout to create a sound somewhere between a short and long u. Mon-t-reux.
 
Fifty years ago the opening lines of "Lolita" tore the literary heavens asunder, blazing an everlasting wake. Could one possibly embark on a pilgrimage to one of Vladimir Nabokov's main stomping grounds - Montreux - without first taking a hearty swig of that intoxicating and dazzling verbal nectar concocted by the writer himself?

Who nowadays still reads "great literature" like this, which is a whole world unto itself? Which long ago slid off the best seller lists? Who still writes it? The words, too, and the accompanying literary mechanisms, assembled like the components of a clock, which Nabokov enhanced with exacting diligence - all of these were carried away long ago, left behind on forgotten platforms. Like the world in which they were written; perhaps like the man who wrote them.

But why Nabokov now? And why Montreux?

There are questions to which the answer is a shrug of the shoulders. We wouldn't dare ask a religious pilgrim: "Why must you visit the holy places?" "Why the hajj?" "Why a pilgrimage?" But from the secular pilgrim, we demand an explanation and a well-reasoned apology, when the appropriate answer is: "Just because!" [ . . .]


-----------------------------------------

Subject:
The burning question ...
From:
"Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Date:
Sat, 19 Sep 2009 14:18:22 -0400
To:
"Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>

 
Telegraph.co.uk
 
 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/nigelfarndale/6209490/The-burning-question-of--Dianas-letters.html 
 

The burning question of Diana's letters

Princess Margaret may have done historians a favour by burning much of Princess Diana's correspondence

 

By Nigel Farndale
Published: 4:27PM BST 19 Sep 2009

 

The dying wish of Vladimir Nabokov was that his son Dmitri should burn the manuscript of The Original of Laura, his last completed (but not fully polished) work, in order to protect his literary reputation. Fair enough. But you can't help wondering – as I'm sure Dmitri, now 74, did, given that the book is being published for the first time this November – that if old Vlad really wanted it burnt, why didn't he burn it himself? It's not difficult, as John Stuart Mill's maid proved in 1835, when she used the only copy of Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History as a firelighter.
 
Dmitri spent decades agonising over whether to fulfil his father's wishes. Princess Margaret seems to have had less of an inner struggle when deciding to destroy much of Princess Diana's correspondence in 1993. Academics have complained, but personally, I think she has done them a service. The letters may have been mundane – yet now they can say whatever historians want or need them to say, a world of speculative possibility having opened up. [. . .]

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