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 […]
The Montreux Palace Hotel, Nabokov’s final home
If you could afford to live anywhere in the world, where would you settle? After the blazing success of Lolita in America and the sale of its movie rights to James Harris and Stanley Kubrick, Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Véra ended up in Switzerland, joining the community of celebrities at the Montreux Palace Hotel on the […]
Terror’s ghosts: Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the return from the Gulag
Heroes returning home in disguise have been around since the days of Homer. For just as long, these heroes have been recognized despite their masks. Coming back from the Trojan War dressed as a beggar, Odysseus found that his dog and childhood nurse could see through his deception. But what about events that transform survivors […]
Beautiful failures: Nabokov, Stalin, and the death of Hamlet
Stuck in the shadows of more accomplished, more loved siblings, lesser novels are often the bitter children of genius. They surrender family secrets and the details of their creators’ flawed parenting. Their failures provide their own intrigue. Such is the case with Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov’s first novel written after his 1940 arrival in America. Revealing more authorial […]
Nabokov, metadata and civil liberties
“I wanted to be a famous spy.”—Humbert Humbert Vladimir Nabokov disdained most novels as “topical trash” and sought to create something transcendent in his own fiction. Yet topics dominating this month’s news about Edward Snowden—government surveillance, political intrigue, and spying—are oddly timeless when it comes to looking at Nabokov’s world. Growing up in the twilight […]
