Vladimir Nabokov, Literary Refugee

This was a fascinating read, I hadn&#x27;t heard about his thing with Pasternak or how they thought that the Soviets &#x27;leaked&#x27; his novel; nowadays it seems sort of odd to see exporting culture as something furtive. Did regimes used to try to <i>prevent</i> their nation&#x27;s literature from spreading, or am I misunderstanding something?<p>&quot;We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of ages, the history of gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read, but at the miracle of it&#x27;s being readable.&quot;<p>- <i>Pale Fire</i>

“Nabokov set about perfecting a brand of English that had not existed before and has not been seen since.” A wonderful essay by a writer who understands what the Russian Revolution actually overthrew, unlike most Americans, who only know the Soviet version. Contains a reproduction of Nabokov’s U.S. immigrant ID card, with the word “without” entered in the space for nationality.

His was to me the most beautiful English prose of the last four centuries, by a generous margin. There was never any trace of foreignness in it. I literally cannot imagine learning another language that fully.

Sometimes one wonders why the Times wanders so far afield, picking up where the New Yorker and others once thrived. Other times, like this one, the cause is clear, pure and joyous, a stab in the literary darkness of our times.