Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0023706, Tue, 26 Feb 2013 11:58:06 -0300

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Re: Epigraphs and versipel (correction)
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Laurence Hochard refers to Michaël Wood's article on Nabokov:... ".. The implication, clearly, is that a writer cannot have two languages," LH adds: " ... as a man cannot have two loves.."

Jansy Mello: Nabokov, in SO, observes that "a writer's talent is his passport." And his American talents are confirmed by the way he altered a popular saying when he described himself as being "as American as apple pie,"* to play with sound (apple, April) and image in order to renew and transform it into his own brand of American. It seems that he embraces the general while, at the same time, by his apprehension of details and experstise, he turns it into something uniquely his. Magic..

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney offers a well-fundamented discussion about this matter in
"April in Arizona": Nabokov as an American Writer - JStor
www.jstor.org/stable/489873 -

The original interview can be found online: "There is no doubt that Nabokov feels as a tragic loss the conspiracy of history that deprived him of his native Russia, and that brought him in middle life to doing his life's work in a language that is not that of his first dreams. However, his frequent apologies for his grasp of English clearly belong in the context of Nabokov's special mournful joking: he means it, he does not mean it, he is grieving for his loss, he is outraged if anyone criticizes his style, he pretends to be just a poor lonely foreigner, he is as American “as April in Arizona” ."
Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction No. 40 Interviewed by Herbert Gold.
Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 40, Vladimir Nabokov
www.theparisreview.org/.../the-art-of-fiction-no-...

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* *wiki: "a saying in the United States, meaning 'typically American.' In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, apple pie became a symbol of American prosperity and national pride. A newspaper article published in 1902 declared that “No pie-eating people can be permanently vanquished.")

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