Vladimir Nabokov

Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic. Vladimir Nabokov

The enchanter interests me more than the yarn spinner or the teacher. Vladimir Nabokov

"The Past is a constant accumulation of images. " Vladimir Nabokov , "Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle"

VEVEY, Switzerland - Dmitri Nabokov, the only child of acclaimed novelist Vladimir Nabokov who helped protect and translate his father's work while also pursuing careers as an opera singer and race car driver, has died. He was 77. Mr. Nabokov died Wednesday at a hospital in Vevey after a long illness. He had been hospitalized in January with a lung infection. Mr. Nabokov spent much of his life trying to carve a life away from the shadow of his father, whose books "Lolita" and "Pale Fire" are regarded as some of the best English prose written.

GENEVA -- Photographer Horst Tappe, whose portraits of literary and artistic luminaries included Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Vladimir Nabokov, and Alfred Hitchcock, has died, a friend said yesterday. He was 67. Mr. Tappe died of cancer Aug. 21 in Vevey, said friend and collaborator Charlotte Contesse. His most widely reproduced portraits included his photo of Picasso half in shadow and staring sideways and a 1970 shot of the Russian novelist Nabokov wearing knee pants and holding a butterfly net. Other memorable photos include a wide-eyed Salvador Dali in a...

VEVEY, Switzerland - Dmitri Nabokov, the only child of acclaimed novelist Vladimir Nabokov who helped protect and translate his father's work while also pursuing careers as an opera singer and race car driver, has died. He was 77. Mr. Nabokov died Wednesday at a hospital in Vevey after a long illness. He had been hospitalized in January with a lung infection. Mr. Nabokov spent much of his life trying to carve a life away from the shadow of his father, whose books "Lolita" and "Pale Fire" are regarded as some of the best English prose written.

A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail from someone named J.G. Ekizian. I immediately assumed it was a fake name, and a clue to a mystery that I probably wasn’t going to be able to solve without some help. I made this assumption because when I got the e-mail I was in the middle of rereading Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,’’ and it seemed to me that “J.G. Ekizian” was a highly Nabokovian name. This is what that great novel does to you: It makes everything in the world seem as if it might be part of it. In other words, the novel, which is about impaired judgment, also makes you feel as...

The greatest literary memoir of the 20th century, Vladimir Nabokov's "Speak, Memory," ends with an emblematic image, that of Nabokov standing alongside his 6-year-old son Dmitri as they gaze at the ship that will carry them from France to safety. Over the preceding pages, the author has survived numerous losses and brushes with danger, fleeing not one but two totalitarian regimes: the Soviets and the Nazis. And while that memoir has many moving moments, none are more so than those dedicated to filial love — Nabokov's love for his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, assassinated...

MOSCOW - A senior Russian Orthodox official said yesterday that novels by Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel Garcia Marquez justify pedophilia and argued they should be banned in the nation's high schools. Father Vsevolod Chaplin's demand that Russia's government investigate and limit the use of the books was the church's latest effort to impose religious norms in a nation that once rejected religion. Chaplin, who heads the Moscow Patriarchate's public relations department, discussed Nabokov's "Lolita" and Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" on Echo of Moscow...

► Today is Thursday, Aug. 18, the 230th day of 2011. There are 135 days left in the year. ► Today's birthdays: Former first lady Rosalynn Carter is 84. Academy Award-winning director Roman Polanski is 78. Attorney Vincent Bugliosi is 77. Gold medal decathlete Rafer Johnson is 76. Actor-director Robert Redford is 75. Actor Christopher Jones is 70. Actor Henry G. Sanders is 69. R&B singer Sarah Dash (LaBelle) is 68. Actor-comedian Martin Mull is 68. Rock musician Dennis Elliott is 61. Comedian Elayne Boosler is 59. Country singer Steve Wilkinson (the Wilkinsons)

"The Past is a constant accumulation of images. " Vladimir Nabokov , "Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle"

GENEVA -- Photographer Horst Tappe, whose portraits of literary and artistic luminaries included Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Vladimir Nabokov, and Alfred Hitchcock, has died, a friend said yesterday. He was 67. Mr. Tappe died of cancer Aug. 21 in Vevey, said friend and collaborator Charlotte Contesse. His most widely reproduced portraits included his photo of Picasso half in shadow and staring sideways and a 1970 shot of the Russian novelist Nabokov wearing knee pants and holding a butterfly net. Other memorable photos include a wide-eyed...

For James Levine's final program in his inaugural season, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's first American music director arranged to commission two American composers born a few months apart in the same year (1938) and who represent complementary but not antagonistic strains in contemporary music. John Harbison's "Darkbloom" is an overture to an opera based on Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" that he decided not to write, for obvious reasons, among them the problem of finding a nymphet of the proper age and appearance who could sing over an operatic orchestra, and the reluctance of opera houses to get...