Andrew Field (1)

A comprehensive biography that unfortunately convinced me mostly what a pompous egoist Nabokov was. The narcissism shows throughout Nabokov's life, and this bio seemed pieced together largely from letters, a few scant conversations, and cryptic snippets of argumentation between Nabokov and his wife Vera. I think I would do better to read literary analysis of his celebrated works, rather than dwell further on his privledged existence. Perhaps the thing that was most disturbing was coming to my personal conclusion that Nabokov easily conjured up the plot for Lolita because such thoughts of pedophilia were easily within his realm of conscious thought. I know one should not automatically correlate artistic creation to real-life conviction, and no doubt Nabokov suffered prejudice from the reading public who held him in suspicion, as I now do. But this biography leads me to believe Nabokov just articulated his Lolita fantasies in novel form. Having read VN, now I imagine the writing ideas came not so much from imagining the musings of a deranged predator but more autobiographically from a selfish, idiosyncratic Russian expatriate who strived to exploit intellectual inferiority.… (mehr)