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Shade's shadow.(Reconsiderations)(Samuel Johnson and Vladimir Nabokov's works)

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From: New Criterion
Date: 20060501
Author:Meyers, Jeffrey

Samuel Johnson and Vladimir Nabokov seem diametrically opposed. The quintessential Englishman, the epitome of the eighteenth-century "Age of Johnson," favored lofty, abstractions, moralistic content and elaborate Latinate style. Modern readers often assume that his works are impenetrable: his criticism misguided, his poetry prosaic, his essays didactic. Nabokov, by contrast, is the embodiment of the witty, urbane, and cosmopolitan modern writer. An uprooted victim of violent revolution, a scientist and scholar, he wandered across two continents and wrote, in two languages, subtly ...

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