![]() ![]() At one point she is molested by an older man named Hubert H Hubert, a homonymous near-miss to Humbert Humbert, the unsavoury charmer of Lolita.įor all its academic interest, the novel-from-the-grave was an unworthy coda to Nabokov’s finished works. ![]() Flora, the heroine, reprises something of the girl theme of Lolita, Nabokov’s 1955 masterwork which Graham Greene, among others, had sought to rescue from threats of censorship. Ignoring the injunction, his son Dmitri Nabokov and wife Véra consigned the manuscript to a Swiss bank vault and, in 2009, it was published. Prior to his death in 1977, Nabokov stipulated that his last, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, be destroyed. Something of that rarefied upbringing was reflected in the Fabergé egg-like refinement of Nabokov’s fiction. The pre-revolutionary St Petersburg of his childhood was a city of sailor-suited privilege, with English nurses and governesses. In his maturity he came to see the loss of his ancestral Russia as the greatest ordeal of his life. W hat do we mean by “Nabokovian”? A deliciously rococo prose? Self-conscious Russian candyfloss? Nabokov’s masters were predominantly Russian: Gogol, Lermontov, Pushkin. ![]()
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