The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer (review)

Abstract

change and whose power never fluctuates. Ronald Bush (“Tennis by the Book : Lolita and the Game of Modernist Fiction”) concentrates on a particular scene in Lolita (Humbert watching Lolita play tennis) and reads it against the grain of earlier criticism, which contended that this fragment provides a literary manifesto about the disinterestedness of art and that Humbert reaches a state of grace. Not only does Bush underline the ironies of the passage (the sexual imagery, Lolita’s feigned passiveness), but he also points to larger concerns about the collusion between art and depravity and places his interpretation in the context of modernist literature. Zoran Kuzmanovich offers a reading of “The Vane Sisters” which does not follow the path of otherworldly or ghostly readings. Instead, he is interested in the short story’s ability to project the narrator and the readers into another psychological dimension, where we are in contact with other minds, with their ecstasies and torments. This kind of expansion and transition is both psychological and aesthetic, since we experience it through reading “one of those rarely realized telepathic conditions” (301).