Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0015676, Thu, 15 Nov 2007 09:00:32 -0500

Subject
Re: SIGHTING: VN and former student Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
From
Date
Body
[EDNOTE. Alexey Filimonov thanks DN for clearing up the question of
VN's first spoken and written language. -- SES]

То Editor:

"The first in which he wrote was Russian"

Замечательное уточнение, на мой взгляд.
Оно вносит ясность в представления (порой самые диковинные) о том, какой

язык был для Набокова первым.

Алексей Филимонов


----- Original Message -----
From: "NABOKV-L" <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2007 6:20 AM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] SIGHTING: VN and former student Justice Ruth
Bader
Ginsburg


>I am pleased and touched to learn that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has
a
>vivid recollection of having taken a course of my father's at Cornell,
and
>that her reading and writing were so strongly influenced by her contact

>with him. I would like to offer a small correction. The affirmation
that
>French was Vladimir Nabokov's first language may well have been the
result
>of a reportorial slip, explainable by the omnipresence of French (as
well
>as English) in many cultured Russian households of the time, and also
by
>the fact that, although Nabokov wrote infrequently in French, he did so

>impeccably: witness "le Vrai et le vraisemblable" an essay on Pushkin,
and
>the story "Mademoiselle O", based on a family governess, and later
>included, in an Englished version of greater factual precison, in
Nabokov's
>autobiography Speak,Memory. The first languages my father spoke were
>Russian and English, closely followed by French. The first in which he
>wrote was Russian.
>
> Dmitri Nabokov

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