The Nabokov Code

Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic – one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

Lolita is surely the first thing that comes to mind when one hears the name Vladimir Nabokov. One may not have heard of the novels Bend Sinister, Pale Fire, The Defense or The Gift, but even non-Russophiles have heard of Nabokov’s infamous Lolita. Some may even have read it.

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July 01, 2007