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'After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant forumula more correct.... My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses - the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions - which the native illusionists, free-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in its own way.'
-- Vladimir Nabokov
Monk's edition of Lolita contains a little explanatory essay by Nabokov. After reading his powerful novel, it is a bombshell that the author considers himself handicapped in the use of the English language. It can kill one's own aspirations to be a writer...
.
'After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant forumula more correct.... My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses - the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions - which the native illusionists, free-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in its own way.'
-- Vladimir Nabokov
Monk's edition of Lolita contains a little explanatory essay by Nabokov. After reading his powerful novel, it is a bombshell that the author considers himself handicapped in the use of the English language. It can kill one's own aspirations to be a writer...
.
