Nabokov, Vladimir

novelist

(Vidéo) Vladimir Nabokov lit un extrait de "Lolita" et liste les plus grands livres selon lui

Artesquieu · May 4, 2021 · partial coverage

• Vladimir Nabokov
• Lolita
• Russia
• exile
• The Texture of Time
• great books
• Joyce
• Kafka
• Proust
• literary dislikes

Coverage note: full (about three minutes; YouTube auto-generated captions with some recognition errors, so titles of books are hedged)

Core ideas

Never returning to Russia. Nabokov says he will never go back to Russia, because all the Russia he needs is always with him: literature, language and his own Russian childhood. He reads the opening of Lolita in English (« Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins… ») and some lines of its Russian version.

A work in progress on time. He describes an unfinished project, provisionally called The Texture of Time: a scholarly-looking essay on time that gradually turns into a story, because it is hard to speak of time without similes and metaphors; the plan is to let those metaphors "breathe", form a story of their own, and then fall apart, all inside a dry, serious essay.

Against "great books", for four masterpieces. He is "perplexed and amused" by journalists' notion of "great books", dismissing Death in Venice, Doctor Zhivago and others as a kind of delusion. His greatest prose masterpieces of the twentieth century, in order, are Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Bely's Petersburg and the first half of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. He also lists what he detests: italicised passages meant to represent a hero's "cloudbursts of thought", piped-in or portable music, concise dictionaries, bridge manuals and journalistic clichés such as "the moment of truth".

Excerpts