/lit/ - Literature

What is his greatest work?

>I don't think in any language. I think in images. I don't believe that people think in languages. They don't move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that’s about all.
Interiormonologuebros...

how do I start with Nabokov?

>[...] the unfortunate Finnegans Wake is nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac! I am. Moreover, I always detested regional literature full of quaint old-timers and imitated pronunciation. Finnegans Wake’s facade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity.
>I detest Punningans Wake in which a cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory.

What would he think of Rabelais?

What’s his best short story?

>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.

>be me, 16 year old russian gentry
>inherit beautiful summer home after aunt dies
>peasants seem restless
>notmyproblem.jpeg
>spend a little time at the house, mostly just writing my girlie books
>October 25 1917
>peasants steal my house and muh writing supplies, forcing me to flee the country with family
>become editor in chief of New Yorker Mag
>declare myself greatest writer of all time

why did he do this bros?

>>21988516
I can't stand him; his style is infuriating, sickening even. I don't even mind the general themes, his writing is just totally insufferable. I can feel his arrogance oozing through the page.

Mediocre books are becoming irrelevant yes, the march of time will only leave us with true works of art.

Mediocre books should not even be written. Literature is not entertainment.

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 English words expressing several, although by no means all, aspects of poshlost are, for instance, ''cheap,'' ''sham,'' ''smutty,'' ''highfalutin,'' ''in bad taste.'' 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.'' Just as I have no ear for music, I have to my regret no ear for Dostoyevsky the Prophet. The very best thing he ever wrote seems to me to be ''The Double.'' It is the story - told very elaborately, in great, almost Joycean detail (as the critic Mirsky notes), and in a style intensely saturated with phonetic and rhythmical expressiveness - of a government clerk who goes mad, obsessed by the idea that a fellow clerk has usurped his identity. It is a perfect work of art, that story, but it hardly exists for the followers of Dostoyevsky the Prophet, because it was written in the 1840's, long before his so-called great novels; and moreover its imitation of Gogol is so striking as to seem at times almost a parody.

>>9852949
>nabokov

subtle

>deep
>deep
>(uuuu)

>>8266987

TRAP INFLUENCED BEATS

>Corncob Tortillas

Although is English is patball to Joyce's champion game.

>>7938412

My shitposts are patball to your champion game.

>>7914100

>baroque architecture
>good

Puffed up, ephemeral. Second rate. Ostentatious and disingenuous. The stuff of rogue brutes. Means absolutely nothing to me.

>>7908493

>tfw your english is patball to Jamba Juice's champion game

>I believe in stressing the specific detail; the general ideas can take care of themselves. Ulysses, of course, is a divine work of art and will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths. I once gave a student a C-minus, or perhaps a D-plus, just for applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from Homer while not even noticing the comings and goings of the man in the brown mackintosh. He didn't even know who the man in the brown mackintosh was. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is patball to Joyce's champion game.

wew Vlad

>James McConkey, a writer and a professor of English Literature who inherited the European Novel course after Nabokov left Cornell, remembers seeing Nabokov, "his whole face flushed and red," running out of the classroom where he was lecturing and into the office of the (still existent at the time) Division of Literature. Nabokov appeared to be so agitated that McConkey actually worried that "he was going to have a stroke or something . . . He was stammering . . . I thought he might fall over." Apparently, this "Pninian-size rage" was occasioned by one of the students' pointed question as to whether, if Professor Nabokov refused to discuss Dostoyevsky, the student himself could.

Was he autistic, /lit/? Also, general Nabokov thread.

>>5372360