Abstract
‘You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance’ (Otchaianie).1 … and literary critics, Nabokov might have been tempted to add, because if art, as Ardalion here tells Hermann Hermann, is always affirming its uniqueness, then critics seem always to be about the business of comparing.
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Notes
Iurii Olesha, Izbrannoe (Moscow, 1974), p. 374. All references to Olesha’s works are to this collected edition unless otherwise stated. The translations are my own.
N. A. Nilsson, ‘A Hall of Mirrors. Nabokov and Olesha’, Scandoslavica, XV (1969), 5–12.
G. Adamovich, review of Russkie zapiski, September 1938, containing Istreblenie tiranov, in Poslednie novosti, 15 September 1938.
Elizabeth K. Beaujour, The Invisible Land: A Study of the Artistic Imagination of Iurii Olesha (New York and London, Columbia University Press, 1970), p. 118.
Interview with Herbert Gold, 1967, in Strong Opinions (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 103.
Interview with Israel Shenker, 1971, in Strong Opinions, p. 181.
Alex de Jonge, ‘Nabokov’s Uses of Pattern’, in Peter Quennell (ed.), Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979), p. 68.
Lolita (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965), p. 298. As has already been noted by other critics, all this last section of Humbert Humbert’s memoir, including the visit to the pregnant Dolly Schiller and the murder of Quilty, possibly never actually happened. This too may be an imagined ending wished upon the story by its unstable narrator. See Christina Tekiner, ‘Time in Lolita’, Modern Fiction Studies, XXV (1979) 463–9.
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© 1990 School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London
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Grayson, J. (1990). Double Bill: Nabokov and Olesha. In: McMillin, A. (eds) From Pushkin to Palisandriia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21065-7_12
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