9 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2024
    1. Schiff, Stacy. “Véra Nabokov Was the First and Greatest Champion of ‘Lolita.’” The New Yorker, March 5, 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210729035701/https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/vera-nabokov-was-the-first-and-greatest-champion-of-lolita.

    2. The New York Post took pains to observe that the author was accompanied to cocktails by “his wife, Véra, a slender, fair-skinned, white-haired woman in no way reminiscent of Lolita.” At that reception, as elsewhere, admirers told Véra that they had not expected Nabokov to show up with his wife of thirty-three years. “Yes,” she replied, smiling, unflappable. “It’s the main reason why I’m here.” At her side, her husband chuckled, joking that he had been tempted to hire a child escort for the occasion.

      !!

    3. It was a tragedy, and the tragic and the obscene mutually excluded each other. (Véra was no lawyer. The sole defense in an obscenity case was literary or educational merit.)
    4. It was Graham Greene, naming “Lolita” among the three best books of 1955, in the London Sunday Times, who set the wheels in motion for American publication.
  2. May 2024
    1. Nabokov’s working notecards for “Lolita.”

      Nabokov used index cards for his research and writing. In one index card for research on Lolita, he creates a "weight-heigh-age table for girls of school age" to be able to specify Lolita's measurements. He also researched the Colt catalog of 1940 to get gun specifications to make those small points realistic in his writing.

      syndication link

  3. Apr 2022