Nabokov: Van Veen, eraser
Erasers, pencils, dreams.
Nabokov: “mere scenery”
The past, in the form of the wreckage of an affair.
“What on earth is an artist?”
Answer: “An underground observatory.” From Ada.
Ada : Sunday breakfast
Uncle Dan is “feeding.”
Ada : “nice normal things”
Ada and Van are very unusual children.
Nabokov to Nabokov
An especially beautiful and startling element in Speak, Memory is the sudden and unexplained direct address of a “you.”
Nabokov at Cambridge
Not an auspicious start.
Nabokov’s orthodontia
Tracking down the name of VN’s orthodontist in Berlin.
Elsie de Nord
In Ada, “a vulgar literary demimondaine.”
A Nabokov pencil sharpener
With “tawny-brown shag.”
Nabokovian handwriting
Father and son.
“Floss, Floss, Floss!”
Nabokov at the beach. Very Proustian.
The “gutticles of the percha”
Nabokov writes about an eraser.
A Nabokov schoolroom
“Everything is as it should be.”
Karr and Nabokov
Karr’s dismissal of estates and ancestors seems to me a form of snobbery in reverse: it’s okay to write your life if you come from a rough or messy background. But fancy-pants aristocrats, Keep Out.
A Nabokov digression
An amusingly Kinbotean digression.
A Nabokov pencil
A childhood memory.
“One could have Timofey televised”
Nabokov seems to have imagined — if only as a horrible pipedream — the end of the classroom and the rise of something MOOC-like.
Nabokov distinctions
“The near near,” “the near far,” “the far near,” and “the far far.”
Separated at birth?
Vladimir Nabokov and Broderick Crawford.
Nabokov on working in the library
“There is, of course, the problem of educating the young.”
Motuweth frisas
The last time I read Pnin all the way through, there was no Internet, at least not for me. Now there is, and motuweth frisas no longer baffles me.
Nabokov hypothesis confirmed
A butterfly hypothesis and a 1958 photograph of VN butterfly-hunting.
Word of the day: lave
Good for word golf
Aunt Maud's clippings
Pasage from Nabokov's Pale Fire, old Life magazine ads
Nabokov's unfinished
On The Original of Laura
Pnin's pencil sharpener
Beautiful sentences from a Nabokov novel
Pnin's posy
Beautiful sentences from a Nabokov novel
Nabokov's index cards, coming in November
Publishers Weekly review of the unfinished Nabokov novel
New Nabokov
The Original of Laura, to be published October 2009, with reproductions of Nabokov's manuscript index cards