Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Mopping up …

… ‘A Russian vowel is an orange, an English vowel is a lemon’ | Spectator USA. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… it was all a performance. Any journalists who presumed to know what Nabokov really thought about anything, let alone those Italian idiots under the impression that Lolita had an autobiographical aspect, were quickly seen off. Did anyone know what was inside there? Did even Nabokov? Or was there just the splendor of his sentences, which can present feeling, impersonate it and retreat heartlessly from it, making the reader weep or laugh heartily when someone is horribly killed in two words: ‘(picnic, lightning)’?

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