Yeah Ada is worth reading if for nothing else than for being the apogee of Nabokov's Nabokovness. Also the late chapter on the nature of time is extraordinary.
Literary history, literary personalities, literary criticism: you've melded them all here and somehow it makes inevitable sense that you should have. Well done! (I read a very unfortunate pseudo-manifesto for "Universality and Prose" from a Substack alt-lit novelist which never once mentioned the greatness of character in railing against auto-fiction. I read that essay three times in disbelief before deciding that any combat-by-comment wouldn't be worthwhile).
I'll confess my own very soft spot for Nabokov, which is like my soft spot for Franz Liszt (pray this analogy lands): I admire the technical brilliance and the sense of play, the virtuosity as the ultimate point of the playing. But when I want to hum along or tap my foot or sing it to myself later, I go for Tchaikovsky or B.B. King or the Arctic Monkeys or Ella Fitzgerald or Elvis Presley. The former is akin to Nabokov; the latter, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Faulkner, all the rest of the novelists whom the arch-aristocrat Sirin dismissed. And yet, I feel I need all of them as styles and visions to plunder as I need. They were personally and aesthetically opposed to each other, but they don't feel in opposition to me as a reader: they look like a banquet spread.
Thank you! Substack must be getting more algorithmic—it gave me the exact same manifesto when I went to the home page today. We can hope what we're talking about is contained in the writer's praise of "imagination." The kid's heart seemed to be in the right place anyway. Agreed on Nabokov. I like Nabokov, and Shelley and Keats of course...sometimes when writing a polemic one uses these major sensibilities strategically as chess pieces (a figure Nabokov would enjoy) and would use them differently in other states of play.
I guess I prefer a literary polemic to have a sense of literary history and aesthetics which predated 1999 (I don’t like autofiction myself and so wanted to like that polemic.)
I understand your movements through the sensibilities - it recalls your discussions of type with Oppenheimer and your past analyses from the Tolstoy-Dostoevsky lenses. They are an endless source of new vantages, right?
Yeah Ada is worth reading if for nothing else than for being the apogee of Nabokov's Nabokovness. Also the late chapter on the nature of time is extraordinary.
Literary history, literary personalities, literary criticism: you've melded them all here and somehow it makes inevitable sense that you should have. Well done! (I read a very unfortunate pseudo-manifesto for "Universality and Prose" from a Substack alt-lit novelist which never once mentioned the greatness of character in railing against auto-fiction. I read that essay three times in disbelief before deciding that any combat-by-comment wouldn't be worthwhile).
I'll confess my own very soft spot for Nabokov, which is like my soft spot for Franz Liszt (pray this analogy lands): I admire the technical brilliance and the sense of play, the virtuosity as the ultimate point of the playing. But when I want to hum along or tap my foot or sing it to myself later, I go for Tchaikovsky or B.B. King or the Arctic Monkeys or Ella Fitzgerald or Elvis Presley. The former is akin to Nabokov; the latter, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Faulkner, all the rest of the novelists whom the arch-aristocrat Sirin dismissed. And yet, I feel I need all of them as styles and visions to plunder as I need. They were personally and aesthetically opposed to each other, but they don't feel in opposition to me as a reader: they look like a banquet spread.
Thank you! Substack must be getting more algorithmic—it gave me the exact same manifesto when I went to the home page today. We can hope what we're talking about is contained in the writer's praise of "imagination." The kid's heart seemed to be in the right place anyway. Agreed on Nabokov. I like Nabokov, and Shelley and Keats of course...sometimes when writing a polemic one uses these major sensibilities strategically as chess pieces (a figure Nabokov would enjoy) and would use them differently in other states of play.
I guess I prefer a literary polemic to have a sense of literary history and aesthetics which predated 1999 (I don’t like autofiction myself and so wanted to like that polemic.)
I understand your movements through the sensibilities - it recalls your discussions of type with Oppenheimer and your past analyses from the Tolstoy-Dostoevsky lenses. They are an endless source of new vantages, right?
Yes, they're like lenses or prisms we can use to change our perspectives. Writers who don't have have access to them are at a disadvantage.