"This semester we will only be civilly rude" to each other ~Dr. S
Wiki links to key terms:
Vlady's major novels (written in English):
- The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
- Bend Sinister
- Lolita
- Pnin
- Pale Fire
- Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
- Transparent Things
- Look at the Harlequins!
- The Original of Laura
"Probing your childhood is the next best thing to probing eternity" ~Nabokov
Blog Assignment #2: reproduce a photo of an earlier time in your life and do a 'Nabokovian' commentary on it
'The Sound and the Fury' by Faulkner came from Macbeth: "out, out brief candle. Life is but a walking shadow a poor player that frets and struts his hour upon the stage and is heard no more, it is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"
Nabokov's favorite memories are those of pure experience and labelless joy
Adam and Eve and the knowledge of good and evil [photo by William Blake btw]
"but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." Genesis 2:17 "Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves." Genesis 3:7
The first lines of Speak, Memory: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats and hour)."
Nabokov is obsessed with identical twins, there are 4 in the Ramsdale class list
Doppelgangers: - Dungeons and Dragons
- Steven King
- Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
- Edgar Allen Poe's 'William Wilson'
- The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- etc
nymphette: coined by Vlad
"It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones. In fact, I would have the reader see "nine" and "fourteen" as the boundaries- the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks- of an enchanted island haunted by those nymphettes of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea. Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not. Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we are nympholepts, would have long gone insane. Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world of synchronous phenomena than on that intangible island of entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes. Within the same age limits the number of true nymphets is strikingly inferior to that of provisionally plain, or just nice, or "cute," or even "sweet" and "attractive," ordinarily, plumpish, formless, cold-skinned, essentially human little girls, with tummies and pigtails, who may or may not turn into adults of great beauty (look at the ugly dumplings in black stockings and white hats that are metamorphosed into stunning stars of the screen). A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine... Furthermore, since the idea of time plays such a magic part in the matter, the student should not be surprised to learn that there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or forty, as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and a man to enable the latter to come under a nymphet's spell." (page 16-7)
The first sentences of Lolita changed Dr. S's life: not making him into a sexual predator, but into a true reader of literature "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita." (pg 9)
Although Dr. S's lines are mighty fine, my absolute favorite line in the entire novel is: "You see I loved her, it was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever site." It is so beautiful that I forget it's wrong, evil, horrible; and just get caught up in the beauty of the words.
"Words themselves as agents of enlightenment [bring] ecstasy" ~Dr S
"Seldom does a casual snapshot compendiate a life so precisely" ~ Nabokov pg 257
ASSIGNMENT FOR THE ADORATION OF DR S: memorize the first lines of Speak, Memory
cronophobia: panic at looking at home movies that take place before you were born
Dr S as Vlad: " I have tried so hard to make these novels enjoyable to you on so many levels, be nice to me! "
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