Thoughts on Vladimir Nabokov

[R.F. Schiller]

I'm new here, and I'm wondering what LitNet's general impressions of Vladimir Nabokov are. For me, his prose is stunningly beautiful and he ranks up there with the greatest authors of the Twentieth Century. However, from what I've seen, he is primarily known for just Lolita (surprisingly for me, the only work of his that made the Top-100 Books, and Pale Fire / Speak Memory to a lesser extent, which I feel is somewhat unfair. Other American novels like Pnin, Ada and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight are really great as well, but don't get much attention. His Russian works, like Despair and The Defense of Luzhin are even more obscure to most bibliophiles. From my perspective, Nabokov had a revolutionary style and served as a transitionalist between Modernism and post-Modernism.

[Pierre Menard]

One of my favourite authors.

Lolita and Pale Fire are two of the very finest novels from the 20th century, and I personally believe his short stories are hugely underrated as well. The Vintage released collection of his short stories is one of my favourite books.

Certainly one of the very finest prose stylists and a joy to read. I always found the criticism that he's too cold, too clinical to be fairly untrue on a personal level…the beauty of his writing has produced some very emotional moments for me, for example when he writes about butterflies in Speak, Memory. Had a savage wit as well.

[R.F. Schiller]

One of my favourite authors.

Lolita and Pale Fire are two of the very finest novels from the 20th century, and I personally believe his short stories are hugely underrated as well. The Vintage released collection of his short stories is one of my favourite books.

Certainly one of the very finest prose stylists and a joy to read. I always found the criticism that he's too cold, too clinical to be fairly untrue on a personal level…the beauty of his writing has produced some very emotional moments for me, for example when he writes about butterflies in Speak, Memory. Had a savage wit as well.

Thanks for your response. Yes, you've summed up a few of his criticisms quite well. He's also being heavily criticized for being too much of an aesthete, and that his works value style over substance. However, in the 10 or 11 novels of his I've read, there is almost always a distinct "point" that he is trying to make, but he deliberately makes the reader do extra work to remove the mask of his writing. He's also been criticized for "hating on" Fyodor Dostoevsky, whom many readers consider a saint, calling him "elephantine" and claiming that Dostoevsky was not really a Russian writer. Nabokov the man was really interesting as well. You mentioned the butterflies in Speak, Memory; I was very surprised to find out that Nabokov was actually a legitimate authority on in the field of lepidoptery (study of butterflies). His collections are still preserved in American museums and one of his controversial theories on butterfly migration was recently proven to be true, almost 50 years later.

[Oppei]

I've read and re-read his short stories. They're really good, one of my favorite collections.

Also you can consider that he was a translator and poet of the first order. I remember picking up a cheap 50c novel at a book sale and it had a sample of all of the stuff Nabokov did, and it only had a small excerpt from Lolita.

His autobiography is also eye-opening for young writers along with his short fictions, translations, and poems.

[mal4mac]

I agree about his short stories, I recently read the 800 page Penguin collected edition and was gripped throughout.

[Vota]

I've only read one short story of his, Spring In Fialta, and I thought it was beautiful yet sad.

I might be nuts, but I felt that his style and F. Scott Fitzgerald's are similar. Both seem to have a very elegant style.

[R.F. Schiller]

That's interesting. While I've read almost 2/3rds of his novels and his autobiography, I have to admit that I have never read any of his short stories yet. All of you seem to recommend them. Any good ones to start? I heard "The Vane Sisters" was pretty good.

[desiresjab]

Nabakov was an excellent poet, ancillary to his prose fame. A bit old fashioned in tone, but he had it down. He does not always sound like a great 19th century poet, though.

The following poem I could not find on the internet. It is good enough that I have always remembered it. What I cannot remember is where the lines broke. Speaking of his native tongue, he said:

Across the seas
Where I have lost a sceptre
I hear the neighing
Of my dappled nouns,
Soft participles
coming
-------down
-------------steps,
Treading on leaves,
Trailing their rustling gowns.