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Vladimir Nabokov
Major works:
The Gift • Speak, Memory • Lolita • Pnin • Pale Fire • Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle • “Spring in Fialta” • ““The Vane Sisters”
Read an excerpt from
Read a passage from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita
Vladimir NabokovThere are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books.
Books
