In his famous Afterword to Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov closed with: My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvetContinue reading “On First And Second Languages V – Nabokov’s Lament”
Tag Archives: French
Dostoyevsky’s Gambler on the French and the Russians
Dostoyevsky‘s The Gambler, contains, like some of his other works, sweeping portraits of character types; in this quasi-autobiographical work, among others, those of a particular nationality. First, then, the gambler, Alexey Ivanovitch, on the French: De Grieux was like all Frenchmen; that is, gay and polite when necessary and profitable to be so, and insufferably tediousContinue reading “Dostoyevsky’s Gambler on the French and the Russians”
Samir Chopra 