Quote:
Originally Posted by radleyp
Nabokov was part of a literary culture in exile. He left Russia before the revolution to study at Cambridge U. and refused ever to return. He was comfortable in four languages (French and German the others) and wrote in three (a little in French, a lot of course in English and Russian (nine novels in Russian, all of them now translated, mostly by him). He even translated Lolita into Russian. His first professional appointments were as a butterfly expert (at the Fogg Museum at Harvard) and he spent many years teaching at Cornell. He made a lot of money from Lolita and returned to Europe for the last years of his life. His 20 years of exile in Europe were spent giving tennis lessons and teaching chess to earn a living. Out of all this came what, in my opinion, is prose writing in English and Russian that is among the best I have read. I think it's ridiculous to put him, or Austen or Dickens on this list: all right, you don't like them, but at least for the two latter they have been around for many years and if there is a credential for excellence it's durability.
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well, it's a thread about subjective opinions. personally i love nabokov ; he is one of my all time favorite authors. i think he's brilliant. it doesn't mean *everyone* has to. i love gogol very much as well, and some other russian authors ; some people (who shall remain nameless...) don't like them. i hate marivaux, but he is still taught in schools and his plays are still staged and he is considered a classic of french literature. i'm at a loss to say why.
des goûts et des couleurs, on ne discute pas
("there's no discussing tastes and colors"), as they say...