From the Pogues to Lolita, a tale of literary revenge
What does the Pogues’ Christmas song “Fairytale of New York” have to do with Lolita? The trail links at oblique angles but leads to a story of betrayal, obscenity, and revenge that would have pleased Nabokov, if only he had lived to hear it. The Irish band’s 1987 carol for the Grinchiest among us tells […]
The Daily Beast and The New Criterion on The Secret History
Long after I expected the well of reviews for The Secret History to have run dry, two new appraisals popped up. Earlier this month, Jeffrey Meyers weighed in on the book for The New Criterion. In “Legacy of Sorrows,” Meyers—a biographer of Edmund Wilson and many other literary figures—declares that The magician buried his past […]
Nabokov, Feynman, and the names of trees
What do Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist, and Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, have in common? For one, synesthesia—a blending of sensory input experienced by four percent of the population. Letters for Nabokov came paired with specific colors, and Feynman similarly reported seeing “light tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s flying around” in […]
The New York Review of Books looks at The Secret History
Nabokov had a complicated relationship with his critics, not least Edmund Wilson, whose 1965 review of Eugene Onegin in The New York Review of Books put a stake through the heart of their friendship. Here’s Wilson’s opening line: This production, though in certain ways valuable, is something of a disappointment; and the reviewer, though a […]
Meet Carl Junghans: informer, propagandist, and… literary inspiration for Nabokov?
Vladimir Nabokov threw a Molotov cocktail into twentieth-century literature with Lolita. Alexander Solzhenitsyn survived Russian forced-labor camps and brought the word gulag into the global lexicon. Plenty of drama involving both of them appears in The Secret History, but as characters in the book they nonetheless faced competition from a lesser-known, scenery-chewing German named Carl […]
Lolita & anti-Semitism: talking Nabokov at the 92nd St. Y
Do you live or work in Manhattan? If so, join me at noon on Wednesday, March 13, at the 92nd Street Y’s Tribeca location to talk about Nabokov in America. I’ll cover the calamities that turned him into a refugee from both the Soviets and the Nazis, as well as what he found in the […]
