June 16, 1947
Superior Amusement
"Bend Sinister" by Vladimir Nabokov
This novel, like Joseph Conrad's "The Nigger of the Narcissus", shows how heady a wine the English language may be for a foreign writer of parts who has thoroughly acquired it. Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov's second novel in English (he has written seven in Russian), is one of the most intelligent nightmares of dictatorship in modern fiction. It is also a lip-smacking over the flavors of English prose to rouse the tired syntax in 10,000 editorials. Nabokov's style glimmers with reflections of many 'great styles (Gogol's, Flaubert's, Joyce's) and yet is distinctively his own: rapid, brilliantly metaphorical, daintily savage and smooth. The reader, never bored, can run his own blue pencil through Nabokov's excesses, such as the "anal ruby" of a bicycle. He will not have the pencil often. Read more...

September 1, 1958
To the End of Night
"Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov
Early during World War II one of the most remarkable writers ever to emigrate to the U.S. arrived in New York from France. Vladimir Nabokov was a stateless Russian. Unlike Oscar Wilde, who earlier at the same port said he had nothing to declare but his genius, Nabokov declared a set of boxing gloves. Two customs inspectors each donned a pair, sparred a friendly round and chalked everything O.K. But it was Nabokov who really won that round, for he smuggled into the country a greater and more scandalous talent than Wilde's. Read more...

November 17, 1958
The 'Lolita' Case
At a book-author lunch in Manhattan not long ago, Vladimir Nabokov faced a formidable force of 1,000 literature-loving women, and when it was announced that, as a feature of the lunch, one of them had won an autographed copy of Lolita, the excited "ooooh" could be heard all the way to Larchmont. Few novels have stirred up so much critical controversy as Nabokov's account of a middle-aged psychopath's passion for a gum-chewing, teenage "nymphet." Read more...

June 22, 1962
Humbert Humdrum & Lullita (Film review)
Wind up the Lolita doll and it goes to Hollywood and commits nymphanticide. Director Stanley Kubrick and Novelist-turned-Scriptwriter Vladimir Nabokov shadow the plot of Nabokov's perverse and remarkable novel rather faithfully, but they have filtered out its shades of meaning. Those who know the book will hoot at this decontamination: those who do not will be mystified as to how the story got its lurid reputation. Read more...

January 1, 1967
The Reality of the Past
"Speak, Memory" by Vladimir Nabokov
Ego dictates all autobiographies, the good and the bad: the truly modest man keeps silent, letting his life speak for itself. The literary world can be grateful that Novelist Vladimir Nabokov is not all that modest a man. He is, in fact, a compulsive autobiographer. For the past 30 years he has been disbursing fragments of this book to an international assortment of periodicals, obsessively revising, editing and amplifying. Now in its final polish, "Speak, Memory" deserves to stand as a rare and precious specimen of the autobiographical art. Read more...

May 23, 1969
Prospero's Progress (TIME cover story)
"One cannot hope to understand an author if one cannot even pronounce his name," Vladimir Nabokov has observed. The point, originally made about Nikolai Gogol (pronounced Gaw gol), applies to Nabokov himself. Over the years he has repeatedly complained about the damage inflicted on the Nabokov name in its passage through foreign ports of articulation. Nab-o-kov, Nab-o-kov. Nah-bo-kov, are frequent errors. Rare mutations, he reports, include Nahba-cocoa and Na-bob-kopf. The correct sound, says the man who made the name famous, is Nahboakoff. Slipping on the mask of a straight face for an instant, he continues: "Vladeemir, as in 'redeemer.'" Read more...

July 18, 1977
Vladimir Nabokov: 1899-1977
Vladimir Nabokov was, in his own words, "an American writer born in Russia and educated in England, where I studied French literature before spending 15 years in Germany." His life was, in fact, a spiral of migrations, and his passport was his art. When he died last week at 78, of a viral infection, at a hospital near his home in Montreux, Switzerland, that art was widely considered to include some of the best novels of the 20th century. There are three masterpieces: "The Gift", written in Russian and first published in 1936, "Lolita" (1955), and "Pale Fire" (1962). In addition to 14 other novels, hundreds of poems, dozens of short stories, dramas, translations, criticism and scientific articles about butterflies, Nabokov produced one of the finest autobiographies in the English language. First published in 1951 as "Conclusive Evidence", the book was expanded and reissued in 1966 as "Speak, Memory." Read more...

October 20, 1980
Interest in Bugs, Not Humbugs
Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature
"All satisfied with their seats? O.K. No talking, no smoking, no knitting, no newspaper reading, no sleeping, and for God's sake take notes." So began Literature 311-312 at Cornell in the'50s, Professor Nabokov presiding. Teaching was of necessity Nabokov's's livelihood in those pre-Lolita days, and he took to it as he took to all the shifting fortunes of his long émigré life: with energy, flair and an unfailing relish for the ironies of the situation. Somewhere in one of those classes, as Nabokov might have guessed, was at least one future novelist, Thomas Pynchon. Somewhere in his own imagination glimmered at least two future academic portraits, the title character of "Pnin" and the poet John Shade of "Pale Fire." Read more...

March 30, 1981
Lo and Hum as Ho and Hum
"Lolita" by Edward Albee
The placards read INCEST ISN'T SEXY and RAPE ISN'T FUNNY. The picketers shouted, "Lolita is a lie, pass it by!" and "Three-five-seven-nine, don't make profits from this crime!" Read more...

April 1, 1985
Gamesman
The Man From the U.S.S.R. and Other Plays by Vladimir Nabokov
There are two kinds of people: those who divide things into two categories and those who do not. Vladimir Nabokov is the first kind. In one of his earliest U.S. lectures, the Russian émigré told his classes at Stanford University that there were essentially, "verb plays and adjective plays, plain plays of action and florid plays of characterization." Read more...

February 13, 1995
Lulu's Erotic Little Sister Lolita
The Latest Operatic Siren, Still Needs A Composer
Throughout Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita the prose chimes with music. How appropriate, then, that Rodion Schedrin, one of Russia's pre-eminent composers, has seized upon the novel for an opera. Schedrin's Lolita, which received its world premiere at the Royal Opera in Stockholm last month, runs four hours; unfortunately, the novel has more music on a single page. Read more...

October 30, 1995
Divinity in the Details
A long-awaited collection of short fiction by Vladimir Nabokov is a treat for old admirers and entry-level fans alike Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977 to mixed reviews. Not everyone was captivated by his erudition, multilingual wordplay and narrative frolics. But those who tuned to his wavelength came to appreciate that the style and gamesmanship so intimidating to his competition disguised the author's larger task: to heighten the pleasures of the natural world and the gratifications of personal creativity. Read more...

March 23, 1998
Taking a Peek at Lolita
And it's a shame you can't see more than that
Here's how the world has turned: the new movie version of Lolita is at this moment playing without any particular controversy in Moscow, former capital of hopelessly square Soviet socialist morality. After something like a year of relentless salesmanship, producers of Adrian Lyne's near reverent (but by no means inept or exploitative) adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's modernist classic has yet to find a theatrical distributor in the U.S., where, of course, morally ambivalent entanglements between older men and younger women have lately been hot news. Read more...