Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov presents problems for me. A fine writer whose goals seem too different from me. 

General background:

Pnin reviewed:

From Yale Courses, a lecture about Lolita, 5. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita. This discusses the literary style of Lolita, how to make an unappealing character appealing. That it was a chess problem seems apt to me.

 The Most Misread Novel of All Time | The Definitive Analysis of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov got me thinking about the misuse of language - something discussed also in the immediately preceding video - and George Orwell. Did they both write on this subject - admittedly from different points, Nabokov from a finer sort of eloquence and Orwell from plain English - having survived through the years of Communism and Fascism? Humbert Humbert as a tyrant is something that comes through to me in these commentaries that was not an idea that formed in my own mind when I read the novel. Sorry, I had come into contact with garden variety Humberts, so that might have left me seeing Humbert as pathetic and delusional. I know there was the ruin and suppression of the girl, but I found nothing else sympathetic for Dolores/Lolita. The only sympathetic character I found in the novel was the mother. 

 The second part of the Yale lecture follows. The lecturer goes into the publishing of the novel, its controversy, and how this also plays into Nabokov's aesthetics. What sticks in my mind is that Lolita dies; art is meant to live; therefore, it seems, Humbert's aesthetics are a dead end.

 I suggest read Pnin, or whatever else comes to hand by Nabokov, before reading Lolita. I cannot escape my original thought is Nabokov wrote a sensation for the sake of making money. This I can see is not the main thrust of the book, unless I am incorrect in what I have gleaned from these videos about the tyranny of eloquence. 

As for my own writing, I think I am too old, with what time I have for writing is borrowed time to have the sense of aesthetics Nabokov possessed and sought after. It may also be I am too Midwestern and have too many vestiges of my childhood Protestantism to be anything but a plain writer.

sch 10/12