This then is my story.
It had glistening eyes like sad black olives.
Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges. But even so, Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years. The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.
Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.
Uncle Dan was feeding.
What I am thinking of is the man of imagination and science, whose courage is infinite because his curiosity surpasses his courage. Nothing will keep him back.
For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases.
They say that suffering is a good school. Yes, true. But happiness is the best university.
Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. Leaving aside his precursors Pushkin and Lermontov, we might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy; second, Gogol; third, Chekhov; fourth, Turgenev. This is rather like grading students’ papers and no doubt Dostoevski and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks.
Dostoevski’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 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.
The whole history of literary fiction as an evolutionary process may be said to be a gradual probing of deeper and deeper layers of life.
Everything was too quiet to be natural. It seemed as if the silence was rising, rising – would suddenly brim over and break into laughter.
One had to forget – because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one’s lips in the dusk of the past.
And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one’s mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower-bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood.
Let us not look for the soul of Russia in the Russian novel: let us look for the individual genius. Look at the masterpiece, and not at the frame – and not at the faces of other people looking at the frame.
Readers are born free and ought to remain free.
All of a sudden I noticed that he had noticed that I did not seem to have noticed Chum protruding from beneath the other corner of the chest. We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other’s arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.
Art is a divine game.
The repetition of words and phrases, the intonation of obsession, the hundred percent banality of every word, the vulgar soapbox eloquence mark these elements of Dostoevski’s style.
When you read Turgenev, you know you are reading Turgenev. When you read Tolstoy, you read just because you cannot stop.