Almost no one wanted to publish Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” After multiple rejections, the Russian writer finally managed to place the novel at Olympia Press, a publisher with a reputation for accepting borderline pornographic work, in 1955. While many might have applied those terms to “Lolita,” the narrator of which, Humbert Humbert, is a pedophile, Nabokov…
Sarah Weinman probably reads more than you do. According to tallies she has shared on Twitter (where she has more than 400,000 followers), she read 462 books in 2008, 400 books in 2010, 340 books in 2011 and 380 books in 2013. She started reading at two and a half years of age, she explained…
The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book By Peter Finn and Petra Couvée Pantheon, 368 pages, $26.95 The Russian Jewish poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was most celebrated by his compatriots for his lyric collections such as “My Sister, Life” and translations of plays by Shakespeare, Calderón and Schiller….
Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian American author of such novels as “Lolita,” “Pnin,” and “Pale Fire,” was a compassionate observer of modern Jewish history. This has been established in such works as Stacy Schiff’s “Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov),” a 1999 study of the writer’s much beloved Jewish wife; essays by critics Maxim Shrayer and Shalom Goldman,…
Dmitri Nabokov, the only child of Vladimir Nabokov and Véra Nabokov (nee Slonim), died 22 February, 2012, in Vevey, Switzerland, at the age of 77. Dmitri Nabokov was a person of many gifts and was one of the most dedicated Jewish sons I have ever encountered. In responding to his parents’ critics — or to…
It’s hard to imagine Vladimir Nabokov as a commercial failure. Yet that was precisely what happened with his second English-language work, the nightmarish and satirical dystopian novel “Bend Sinister,” which celebrates its 65th anniversary today. Originally titled “The Person from Porlock,” then “Game to Gunm[etal]” and later “Solus Rex,” “Bend Sinister” was Nabokov’s first novel…
The L.A. Times explores Jordan’s premiere destination for banned books. The Wire creator David Simon talks about his father Bernard Simon, a “professional Jew” and the public relations director of B’nai B’rith for more than 20 years. New York’s Kehila Kedosha Janina is the last Greek synagogue in the Western Hemisphere. Philip Glass is writing…
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