Feb 14th 2008
From The Economist print edition

IMAGINARY conversations with dead people are risky materials for a book, as are authorial comparisons with geniuses. So Nina Khrushcheva, great-granddaughter of the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, and herself an émigré Russian intellectual, is doubly ambitious in her slim volume of autobiographical literary and political reflections on Vladimir Nabokov, believed by many to be the greatest Russian writer of the last century.

She is ambitious too in her panoramic and sometimes dizzying sweeps through two centuries of Russian culture and politics. The reader who opens the book and finds references (on a random two pages) to Tertz, Pushkin, the Mnemosyne, Koncheyev, Godunov-Cherdyntsev, Brodsky and the “bamboo bridge” between poetry and prose could be forgiven for feeling intimidated. If he happens then on the sentence, “I saw myself in many ways walking in Nabokov’s footsteps,” he might even sense a whiff of impudence.

But Ms Khrushcheva’s approach is both accessible and modest. A self-deprecating tone saves her from pretentiousness. And from her opening contention, that “Nabokov’s journey from obscure Russian émigré writer to the author of American and world literary classics is essential for understanding Russia’s past, its present and its future”, she wears her learning lightly. If you are not quite sure at the beginning of the book who Pushkin was and why he matters, you will know enough by the end to appreciate her finely drawn comparisons and contrasts between these two towering literary figures, and feel only mildly miffed by the publisher’s sloppy omission of an index, or any pictures of the places she so eloquently describes.

It is a struggle between two self-absorbed opportunists. Margot has a determination and cruelty to her that Dolores never has, Albinus is not as twisted as Humbert.

For this reason, it was easier to watch both her and Albinus plummet into their own brand of moral deprivation.

Very interesting analysis about Anna Karenina. I have a renewed interest in reading it to see the parallels.

Mothers aren’t concerned about the pull-out desk; they’re concerned about the young girls’ bed being called “Lolita”.

A spokesman for the company, Woolworths, told the Times “What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either. We had to look it up on Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now.”
The item has now been removed from the Woolworths site, the fate of the spokesman is undisclosed.