All is play …

… Vladimir Nabokov’s ringside vision of art and life | TLS. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

As a young man Nabokov had taken boxing lessons from a “wonderful rubbery Frenchman, Monsieur Loustatot”, fondly remembered in his autobiography, Speak, Memory; he boxed competitively as an undergraduate at Cambridge; and in Berlin he and his friend George Hessen staged a number of bouts. In 1924, he published a poem called “The Boxer’s Girlfriend”, and in his first major work, The Tragedy of Mister Morn (see below), the protagonist, Morn, talks about a fist fight with expert attention to specific punches: a hook is a “comma”, a jab a “full stop”.