/lit/ - Literature

>>22825287
Russians are resentment fueled monkeys

the only one that pisses me off in that list, and I consider it a great achievement to be only bamboozled by this dickhead on one name, is Dostoevsky. he is my muse, my savior, forever and always dearest man to my heart. how dare did this fucker talk shit about my hero?

>>22825365
I got a strong impression Nabokov does not believe in redemption from reading Lolita at least.

>>22825404
The point being they are very different. Nabokov is perhaps elitist and fatalistic, Dostoyevsky more patriotic and merciful.

There goes Vladimir Nabokov, the biggest ASS that ever lived
what a DOUCHE

He doesn't, my favorite author's note is "Love him."

>>22825404
Lolita wasn't about anything other than words that sound good together.

>>22825287
Nabokov was subhuman

>>22825287
he's so wrong about Faulkner it hurts

>>22825365
Because Tolstoy is better

>>22825977
and cunny
but not nearly enough of it
nor young enough for my tastes

he was an unreliable narrator

>>22825977
Literature isn't about anything than words that sound good together (and cunny.)
Art isn't about anything than things that go well together.
Beauty is the Good and the Good is Beauty.

>>22825365
If you are alluding to Dostoevsky’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigamarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search. Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity – all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of ”sinning their way to Jesus” or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, ”spilling Jesus all over the place." Crime and Punishment’s plot did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway. Dostoyevsky seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.

>>22825365
Nabokov liked strong experiential descriptions and didn't care for plot tension since he re-read everything five times anyway.
There's no overlap between Dostoyevsky's strengths and Nabokov's tastes.

I don't get the "Don Quixote is a cruel book" meme. I mean, I get it, he gets beat up a lot, but that's just superficial. I found it ultimately very compassionate.

>>22826815
I found it one of the saddest books I've ever read.

>>22825287
>Joyce, James. Great. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. Let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is patball to Joyce's champion game. A genius.
>Ulysses. A divine work of art. Greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose. Towers above the rest of Joyce's writing. Noble originality, unique lucidity of thought and style. Molly's monologue is the weakest chapter in the book. Love it for its lucidity and precision.
>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Never liked it. A feeble and garrulous book.
>Finnegans Wake. A formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab, redeemed from utter insipidity only by infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations. Detest it. A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory. Indifferent to it, as to all regional literature written in dialect. A tragic failure and a frightful bore.
I'm pretty happy with my choices

>>22826920
>between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter
What's the point of this?

>>22826905
Yes but that's not the same as cruelty. It shows how the world is cruel against don Q, which is sad at times, but by even deciding to show this imho Cervantes shows compassion with his main character. And surely you have not missed at certain moments Q's hints at self-awareness and the way his madness is in some sense voluntary.
>>22826923
I though the same but he lists "between 10 and 15" too in some places so I guess it makes sense as a comparison.

>>22826923
"I liked this author/book since I was twenty" is too pedestrian and proletarian.

>>22826923
It's all stitched together out of fragments of sentences based on their context. Nabokov did not actually write those words in that order.
IIRC this phrasing means that Nabokov put it on a list of books he liked in that time period and also said he still likes it.

>>22826967
You're missing the point. DQ went "mad" in the first place because of the inescapable cruelty of his/our world. There is no resolution towards this; it's just dealt with a subtle, almost anachronistic nihilism. I think Nabokov just hated this. My hypothesis is that it hit too close to home for him because if you've read The Luzhin Defense, this is exactly what the theme and tone of the novel is.

>>22827336
>dealt with a subtle, almost anachronistic nihilism
through*

>OP, Hate him. Derivative and a fag. Primarily an anon for newfags.

You thought your favorite book meant something? It means absolutely nothing to me, a nonentity, dreadful.

>>22827336
No anon YOU're missing the point, he went mad from reading too many chivalric romances.

>>22825977
>>22826656
It was also about making fun of things, including the clueless reader who doesn't get it, including about baiting the moralizing American so predictable in his offence and outrage.
It was also about exorcizing a fantasy he had many years earlier while in Paris. Perhaps it was also just an excuse for him to travel the US more extensively.

>>22825287
Kafka, Franz.

The Metamorphosis.Second-greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose

Based. Though whats his number 1? Ulysses?

>>22825404
>>22825365
>>22825413
>>22825977
>>22826705
>>22827450
genuinely annoyed at how shallow some of these takes are, and i know at least some of you arent baiting. read the "good readers and good writers" essay and his lectures on dostoevsky. dosto is one of the few authors where we can actually read nabokovs more in depth opinions on.

for nabokov, art is the creation of a new world, with complexity and detail and particularity giving it beauty. his characters arent simple symbols in a fable to convey a message or to make fun of a generality irl. and no, no one puts all that effort and intricacy into something just to troll the public or for le phonemes. he takes pleasure in fleshing out his newly created world and its quirks and other aesthetic qualities we all enjoy like elegance, symmetry, contrast, cohesion, originality etc. he argues this is what draws a great artist to make great art. its creating your own creation with care, not necessarily just commenting on what happens to be around.

now he did include theaching as an aspect of great art (i wouldnt but im only defending him here) so his critique of dosto isnt just "oh he doesnt care enough about the clothes of a character" but even the clothes thing is symptomatic of something bigger that shows itself in the teachings of a book. his view on dosto is that he deals in bland, simple and dead generalities. for him it is particularity which gives life not only to a book but also to its message. in his lecture on notes from the underground for example he points out the lack of specificity in how "sin" is reffered to, rendering all the ramblings on sin meaningless. with all these in mind i dont think he deserves these same dull comments thread after thread after thread.

>>22827720
dumb critique because the most important thing about Dosto is his characters. Seeing him as some sort of social commentary thing is anachronistic
> If I was ever happy it was not in the first intoxicating moment of my success, but before I had ever read or shown anyone my manuscript; in those long nights spent in exalted hopes and dreams and passionate love of my work, when I was living with my fancies, with the characters I had myself created, as though they were my family, as though they were real people; I loved them, I rejoiced and grieved with them, and sometimes shed genuine tears over my artless hero

>>22827737
Nabokov’s anachronism comes the fact that Dosto references of going on in newspapers or journalistic riffing come from a time when the news was seen as a part of literature and Nabokov grew up in the age of radio. Just shows how literature becomes more irrelevant and self referential under Nobakob’s style and the people he influenced

>>22825287
nasty little gremlin

this guy makes me hate literature. what I have been reading and enjoying? I am just a pleb. I cannot understand any of the books in depth like him. I am just one degree below a netflix watcher.

>>22827862
that sounds more like philosophy or like you're thinking of literature as philosophy. It's absolutely insane

>>22827887
No you just don’t get the secret meaningful codes, it’s all an elaborate tapestry of meaning and codes and the end of game is for it to get more and more symbolic and complicated and oh so deep and meaningful

>>22827737
not just social commentary but making universal points in general. and when it comes to characters apperantly they didnt meet nabs standarts of specificity or fleshing out. there certainly are characters out there (not necessarily speaking of dosto here) who are personifications of a general idea or a contradiction and so feel too simple in an ugly or cliched way, when on the other hand really real characters can have clothes they were gifted, benign medical deviations, veichles that have a place in their lives, aunts that dont enter into the plot, rooms they imagine when they read about a room in a book, false memories, exceptions to the general trends of their artistic tastes, speech patterns you recognize only on a reread, superstitions they dont believe in but that they obey anyway, compliments and insults they cant forget and so on.

>>22827862
>fondle details
its less about "understanding" literature in depth and more about enjoying them in depth.

>>22828018
Idk it sounds more like literature was just completely buck broken during his time and all of that is just complete philosophical cope replacing fruitful rules of art with other rules that aren't as fun but pretending like it's the most fun and complex thing in the world. It's completely impotent and insane. I don't know how anyone is supposed to care, maybe if it weren't so historically shallow because it just seems like this whole skeletal trend without anything really comprehensive or any sort of grounded real historical system or anything. It doesn't make sense

>>22828018
Like it just sounds like a very specific historical convention that people are just supposed to take for granted as having substance because books are 'about people' so it's more 'deep' and 'real' if you write about the characters dentist appointment when there's really not that much there historically to make it worthwhile. There's no comprehensive system of thought that's behind it it just seems like a trend that makes sense at the time as literature becomes more irrelevant and then leads to a lot of the bad stuff in lit now

>>22828085
>>22828140
i think a fleshed out and original fictional world (which doesnt just mean the characters) is inherently valuable artistically, like music, and that such inherent values are what all art shares. a book with a character's dentist employment does make it more real and interesting to me, and double points if you can make the appointment itself be interesting. its not just particularity but peculiarity too of course and a lot of other things that make something beautiful, but i gather youre against beauty for the sake of beauty since you use words like fruitful.
>There's no comprehensive system of thought that's behind
behind what? that art should be beautiful?
>it just seems like a trend that makes sense at the time as literature becomes more irrelevant and then leads to a lot of the bad stuff in lit now
i dont think a lot of people are writing simply for the joys of careful creation rn, nor do i think its a recent trend to do so.
>but pretending like it's the most fun and complex thing in the world.
it is fun to some and more details do result in more complexity, which makes it fun. its okay if you dont enjoy literature or the aesthetic aspects of it. nabokov couldnt understand music.

>>22827749
nabokov was well into his twenties when radio first became a common household item

>>22828211
>Breaking chekhov's gun cause worldbuilding
Surely there's a better way to make the fictional world seem real

>>22828211
It just sounds like you subject the characters to that rule of beauty or aestheticism in the same way as if you were making ‘universal points’, what kind of rule is that, it all sounds very specific. Beauty and aestheticism are always tied to specific ideas, and created by the ideas binding and ordering them, there has to be something grounding it all even if it’s ‘nothing’ as it’s own specific point. Something is beautiful because it makes a man better, you feel an attachment of vanity to it. Literature is just that same youthful joyful voice of the young man in that way, it’s all erotic, something is beautiful because it’s attached to the vanity of a person but it’s the pure ideas behind them that the real addict wants. That’s what a man wants, the hungriest animal, there’s no way he stays satisfied with your beauty, he wants the universal ideas and drink directly from the source ect

>Shakespeare, William. A tedious, trite, dull Englishman. A favorite from the ages of 5-7 (when I read his complete collected works) and detested by me afterwards when I gained genuine sapience at about the age of 8 or so. Essentially a writer for very young boys. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his soulful princes tormented by ghosts are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway. The pederasty of his sonnets is disgusting, vile, loathsome and execrable, and, unlike in my “Lolita” (one page of which outweighs in aesthetic merit the entirety of the Bard’s corpus), cannot be claimed to be ironic. His use of iambic pentameter was a dull, cliched, formulaic choice, and he would’ve done better writing in dactylic hexameter. Cheap, used, collected editions of his works bought from American garage sales make an extraordinarily good and long-lasting source of toilet paper. I make an exception for his “The Merry Wives of Windsor”, which is inexplicably one of the greatest works of literature ever created by an otherwise abominable creator of the equivalent of his day’s penny-dreadfuls for the hoi polloi. One would like to have seen him smothered to death with a pillow by his wife, Anne.

>>22828357
Nice.

>>22828340
sorry if i missed your point, youve lost me a bit
>That’s what a man wants, the hungriest animal, there’s no way he stays satisfied with your beauty, he wants the universal ideas and drink directly from the source ect
even if you are concerned with the Truth in fiction, universal ideas are empty (since definition and meaning come from the limitations of specifity, the more general the more empty) and generalizing talk is misleading, which is demonstrated by the fact that your generalizing statement:
>That’s what a man wants, the hungriest animal, there’s no way he stays satisfied with your beauty, he wants the universal ideas and drink directly from the source
excludes me, since i am a man and am satisfied with beauty and dont come to literature for universal ideas
>there has to be something grounding it all even if it’s ‘nothing’ as it’s own specific point.
are you asking me what makes something beautiful or why?
>>22828339
not everything is a chekovs gun in a story. and pointing to an element as if it was one only to break the chekovs gun rule is a valid artistic device. but also you can (and a writer like nabokov always does, even with something as small as allusions to monkeys in lolita) incorporate and weave minutia into motifs that come back in satisfying ways, making little chekovs water squirters out of them. john farlow, a pretty minor character even when compared to jean farlow, sends a letter to humbert towards the very end of the story where he relates his current living conditions which surprises HH and takes him out of his solipsism. this not only creates a symmetry by having a callback towards the beginning or having a detail pay off but also reinforces the theme of not being able to peer into peoples inner lives. internal resonances like this are a lot more obvious in simpler stories but itd feel cheaper and, well, obvious. thats the greatest advantage of a complex fictional world. it adds subtlety, nuance, color to the underlying symmetries of stories, like chords on a bass line

>>22828496
What makes something beautiful is vanity because man is an animal and living breathing creature. It is a bad thing it's not some good happy fun time story, it's something perverse and selfish and totally insane. That means that beauty is a lie, you're sitting here telling me you're satisfied with lies and then you'll say literature isn't about truth but it all just sounds totally defeated. It's more honest and clever to be skeptical but the idea of perfection is the only real motivating thing that matters, the best people can't be satisfied. The thing about universal ideas is that man has to have a specific reason to care about something, if only that his brain has the same relation to the world as his stomach, that's why things of the mind are described as fruitful. Plato's idea of eroticism is that these fruitful things of the mind are ensouled in an aesthetic environment that emanates and replicates it, but it just uses the beauty and the beauty itself wastes away, it's a crime. You're playing the skeptic but you don't doubt the motivations behind people's interest in something, in this case beauty, it really is just a bad shameful thing, and if it's not perfect than why would anyone really care. You have to believe man

>>22828496
That's fair, but a whole lot different than a dentist appointment section with no purpose other than showing off a Faulknerian prose to give the world a real feeling and the writer quirkiness.

>>22825287
He actually says my favorite author is "a favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter."

>>22828646
i have no idea what youre talking about. could you give me an example of a book you like and why, in order to demonstrate what the purpose of literature should be to you if not be beautiful?
>>22828699
>showing off a Faulknerian prose to give the world a real feeling and the writer quirkiness.
thats three reasons right there. and a section like the dentist appointment with no immediate narrative function would still serve the aesthetic function of immersion, since if the artificial narrative-ness is in your face all the time the audience sees through the shabang. but of course those things still have to be done within taste, moderation and cohesion. someones floating pet in a sci fi story that isnt brought back still adds to the story imo. it may not be part of the skeleton but it is flesh or even feather and you can fly with enough of those. also if it is the writers genuine quirkiness or style i do value those more than the basic plot. the problem with quirkiness for the sake of quirkiness or faulkners flowery prose is theye are putting on an act, doing things because they want their writing to be percieved a certain way and not being a certain way.

>>22828871
>a section ... with no immediate narrative function would still serve the aesthetic function of immersion
I do not subscribe to this, imo, immersion and aesthetics are derived from the whole and are holistic in nature. I dislike works when the writing looks planned chapter by chapter instead of a manifestation.
>if it is the writers genuine quirkiness or style i do value those more than the basic plot
This can work if there's something connecting the individual idiosyncrasies to give cohesion like you stated, but I concede on the personal taste of it since I value plot higher

>>22828871
Well I would say it’s like the difference between Ibsen and Shakespeare as much as it is the Bible and the Quran. Shakespeare is like air flowing and flowery, but Ibsen is like the flower on fire. The intensity and the stakes of Brand and his ‘all or naught’, the type that matches Dostoyevsky’s pathos. The construction of the Gyntian self and all the comprehensively defended pride and ego and doom of the characters, it’s the flower on fire. It’s all ‘universal’ in the sense of complete or all encompassing. To say that you don’t relate to the pathos in Raskolnikov’s confession ‘and I know now, Sonia, that whoever is strong in mind and spirit will have power over them’ it’s inhuman. People don’t pick up on it but it really is Dosto’s epic science side, like when he has Myshkin say he’s a materialist. It’s full on pessimism, it’s apocalyptic like with Ibsen. It’s also crazy how much life Ibsen put into the historical characters of Julian, Libanius, Basil and Makrina, all their arguments and defenses of themselves and their ideas, because that’s what life is, it stands up for itself. And art has to have life in it, but life Is apocalyptic and the whole world on fire like with revelations or something. It’s the psychic intensity of the book that matters. but I honestly mostly read Dosto for his heroines and read him like a visual novel, my favorite would be Injured and Insulted, it’s basically the peak of visual novels, to me that is top tier art and those games have the same brief punctuating and clean observations like with Ibsen, it’s the same psychic intensity but with music, I think Jun Maeda is a current literary genius

>>22828967
>I do not subscribe to this, imo, immersion and aesthetics are derived from the whole and are holistic in nature. I dislike works when the writing looks planned chapter by chapter instead of a manifestation.
sure i mean, if the section sticks out in an unwanted way thats no good. it has to work within the whole and the whole has to work, youre right. all im saying is a part that seemingly serves no purpose or an accumulation of such parts may go on to make the work great. in audio engineering some basic broad strokes mixing can take a track from unlistenable to eh, but from eh to great its a lot of small touches that are unnecessary on their own, though maybe for someone else the jumps are from unlistenable to good to great. also when individual works are concerned i can think of many great books that have unremarkable or loose plots

martin luther's 95 theses and nabokov's recommendations, two lists to seethe them all.

>>22828967
>I dislike works when the writing looks planned chapter by chapter instead of a manifestation.

>INTERVIEWER: E. M. Forster speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels. Has this ever been a problem for you, or are you in complete command?
>NABOKOV: My characters are galley slaves.

>>22829256
dangerously based

>>22829173
okay now its a lot more clear thank you. i have a friend who reads visual novels, ill ask him about injured and insulted. to me beauty is neither pure pathos nor mere cleverness. it doesnt connote floweryness to me and isnt well described by air flowing. speaking of apocalyptic, i love john martin which might be common ground for us. but what matters to me isnt relatability or even the gut level emotions it produces or that it conveys such and such about Life with a capital L (especially since there is no Life, there are only lives). but in art, there is something ineffable even if subtle that arises almost mysteriously when you arrange whatever material (wether human experiences like in most novels or frequency ratios in music or clay like in sculpture or concrete in architecture) in a certain kind of way (described by all the words i used before like contrast, originality, symmetry, cohesion, detail, subtlety... etc) and some wierd effect that i can only call beauty comes out. it is an emotion but its no conventional sentimentality and can come from very inhuman things that have barely anything to do with human Life or lives. there is no maj7 chord in human life outside of music, nor a lolita outside of literature. they arent expressions, they arent representations, but they are new creations made out of the materials of life that are valuable in and of themselves. since you have said psychic intensity, i could say that i dont think people who arent disturbed by eden lake or arent touched by the ending of phaedo or toy story 2 are human, but those arent necessarily great works. true beauty isnt in tears of tragedy or hope for me. its in something like the night of the hunter, or nine stories. although eccleciastes resonates with me more ideologically and emotionally, revelations is much more interesting artistically. and over the bible or quran i would take moby dick, becketts trilogy, pale fire not because they provoke more intense emotions but because theyre more interesting to me artistically.

Salinger, J. D. By far one of the finest artists in recent years.
"A Perfect Day for Bananafish." A great story. A particular favorite. He almost makes me feel ashamed for my antisemitism (along with other greats like Kafka and Proust), but then I Iook through the pages of Philip Roth, that imbecilic chauvinist inexplicably praised by American critics for his cheap sentimental soap-operas and pseudo-journalistic topical claptrap, and I no longer feel so ashamed. The implication of the troubled American boy Holden molesting his younger sister Phoebe is particularly well-done, and I took inspiration from it in writing my (far superior work) “Lolita”. You know I do not like to get too salacious in my literary criticism, but, I must confess that, much to the chagrin of my wife, I have brought myself to climax many times with this book of his [ed. note: The Catcher in the Rye], often asking Vera to read aloud the relevant passages of the troubled boy Holden with his younger sister Phoebe while I manually stimulate myself to completion, which I find very amusing to admit. A wonderful author.

>>22825287
Despite some disagreements it's nice to see an author of his status be so frank about his opinion of others. Nowadays everyone is so fucking gay and afraid of offending that they offer nothing of the sort. Are there any other authors with lists like this?

>Finnegans Wake. A formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab, redeemed from utter insipidity only by infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations. Detest it. A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory. Indifferent to it, as to all regional literature written in dialect. A tragic failure and a frightful bore.
My nigga.

>>22825287
What does he think about Yeats, and whats his favorite poets besides those?

What infuriates me is that he loved something for 6 years and now loathes it. That's half a decade of enjoyment.

He might be right about Dostoyevsky excelling as a dramatist.

>>22825287
>Chesterton
>Romantic in the large sense
Heh

>>22825287
I don't think he was being sincere in his opinions. He always liked to play games in that way.

What did he think of Dante?

>Camus, Albert. Dislike him. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me. Awful.
>Sartre, Jean-Paul. Even more awful than Camus.
gets me every time

>>22826920
>Finnegans Wake.
>Conventional and drab
Always makes me laugh

>>22825287
It is so refreshing to have someone speak so candidly. Especially now that millennials have erased and silenced criticism.

https://youtu.be/V8OwyqvSh2g?si=RtbffrQ0HTStnZaO

He talks about his four greatest works of the twentieth century in this interview at some point. In descending order:
>Ulysses
>The Metamorphosis
>St. Petersburg
>the first half of ISOLT

>Pushkin is Great, Dostoevsky is awful
Typical Nabokov, only form and spit over essence.

>>22825977
>Lolita wasn't about anything other than words that sound good together.
It's awful in Russian. He did translate it himself, but this is one of the worst "book translation" and book as is.

>>22829651
>>22831645

Other than being a mongochomo, he is pretty based.

>>22825287
Mostly amused he was as charitable to Celine & Hemmingway as he was, and Emerson's poetry. The Updike praise is a black mark on his judgement, then again taste really is incommensurable.

>>22826790
If he had a fault it was in having excessively Norman instincts in an Anglo-Saxon tongue trying to chase unnatural elision.

>>22826815
It's the Anti-Infinite Jest. Cervantes rolled in the grave when he an hero'd.

>>22826923
It’s taken from a much longer interview where he was listing books and said “I read this at 15 and don’t care about it as much as an adult” vs “I read this at 20 and it stayed with me for life.”

>>22825287
But Nabokov is my favorite author...

>>22832668
>excessively Norman instincts
What does this mean?

>>22831649
This. >>22830706
You have to love writers like him. Nowadays everyone has to be polite and civil and back-scratching. And /lit/ doesn't like it. But /lit/ will reee about Nabu for being opinionated.

>>22829651
>A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue
Isn't that much of Nabokov's work itself?

What would Nabokov think of Tom Green?

>no comments on Dickens
Big W.

>>22825287
Did he ever comment on Geoffrey Chaucer?

>>22833822
maybe if you're illiterate

My favourite author played a key role in making sure Lolita got published in Britain.

What did he think of Nabokov?

>>22833980
A genius. I'd like to have written this myself. A man of infinite talent. Extraordinarily handsome. A favorite from the age of 0.

>>22829386
I might be off here, but it sounds like you're talking about the Romantics notion of the sublime.

>>22833835
He loved Bleak House