While on the quotation-spotting game (oft called Author! Author!), I submit the following, with apologies if it has already been discussed on this forum. Name the author/source, preferably without excessive googling. Hint: the quote is translated from the original Russian text:
What I have come to like best in the whole of Russian literature is the childlike Russian quality of Pushkin and Chekhov, their shy unconcern with such high-sounding matters as the ultimate purpose of mankind or their own salvation ... While Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky worried and looked for the meaning of life and prepared for death and drew up balance-sheets, these two [Pushkin, Chekhov] were distracted, right up to the end of their lives, by the current, individual tasks imposed on them by their vocation as writers, and in the course of fulfilling these tasks they lived their lives, quietly, treating both their lives and their work as private, individual matters, of no concern to anyone else.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 23/06/2011 18:29, "NABOKV-L" <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote:
Dear List,
Although Jansy Mello got there first, Hafid Bouazza and A. Bouazza also correctly answered Mike Stauss's question about the quotation from the introduction to Bend Sinister. On the structure of Nabokov's introductions, by the way, I recommend Charles Nicol's essay in the first issue of Nabokov Studies.