Lucy Lawless [Xena] reads Sartre's "No Exit"

Uh, okay, this is different.

From PEL [Partially Examined Life]...

Mark Linsenmayer and Wes Alwan are joined by real actresses Lucy Lawless (Xena, Battlestar Galactica, Parks & Recreation, etc.) and Jaime Murray (Defiance, Dexter, Warehouse 13, etc.), who are pals through working together on Spartacus.

Technical Warning: If you downloaded this before Jan. 3, 4pm central, then there was a problem with the file that causes it not to play right if listening in mono (like out of your iPhone speaker). This problem has been fixed, so you should re-download if you were having problems.

Also, this is a cold read, not a rehearsed production, for educational purposes only (meaning you’re not allowed to have fun listening to this, I guess).

You can read the version we read of this 1944 French existentialist play online here. You may also want listen to Mark explain Sartre’s view of human nature and freedom and read more about the topic.

End song: “No Exit,” by Mark Lint, freshly written and recorded for this occasion.

No Exit

Jean-Paul Sartre [Wikipedia]

Jean-Paul Sartre [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Sartre’s Existentialism [International Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Jean-Paul Sartre Archive

North American Sartre Society


No Exit text

And this from the BBC...

Jean-Paul Sartre..."In Camera" [aka "No Exit"]

Nelly Ternan, mistress of Charles Dickens, portrayed by Felicity Jones on film

"Ralph Fiennes: Charles Dickens 'absolutely had a child' with Nelly Ternan"

Speaking after the Toronto film festival premiere of The Invisible Woman, actor/director says evidence strongly suggests Dickens's affair bore offspring, and reveals his own complex relationship with the writer

by

Chris Michael    

September 7th, 2013

theguardian.com

Contrary to his image as avuncular national treasure, Charles Dickens was a tormented figure, who likely fathered at least one illegitimate child and may have projected his affairs into his novels, says the actor Ralph Fiennes.

Speaking at the Toronto film festival the afternoon after the premiere of The Invisible Woman, in which Fiennes plays Dickens as he pursues an affair with much-younger actress Nelly Ternan, the actor said the gap between brand and man is much wider with Dickens than most people realise. "Dickens was tormented, he had huge extremes of emotion. We tend to get the sort of Christmas card Dickens – the smiling, jolly father-figure, entertaining the family. But when you read about him, you can identify this very disturbed man: a man in anguish."

Adapted by Abi Morgan from a biography by Claire Tomalin, the film's portrayal of Nelly (played by Felicity Jones) as a complex character torn between love and social suicide has reverberations in the novelist's work, Fiennes said.

"Great Expectations was written when we know he was involved with Ellen Ternan. And Felicity and I had a lot of conversations about the degree to which Estella might be inspired by Nelly. It's very interesting the extent to which you can identify elements of Nelly in many of his female characters, especially in his later books."

"I actually feel that his female characters get much better after his affair with Nelly," Jones joked.

Though Tomalin's biography stops short of declaring the couple definitely suffered a miscarriage, Fiennes is confident in his film's version of events. "Claire argues that although there is no absolute proof, she believes there was certainly consummation. And absolutely she believes there was a child, even possibly two. Other biographers have started to acknowledge that this is probably the best bet."

The couple also spent time in France, and great chunks of time are unaccounted for in Dickens's diaries. "France was the place people went to in England when they had to deal with illegitimate births. So I just followed the hints and the leads that Claire writes."

But Fiennes also felt it was important not to sensationalise the story. "I was wary of the quick leap to judgment – 'Dickens was a scoundrel.' An Irish friend of mine said, 'Oh he was a bit of a bollocks, wasn't he.' But there's a whole spectrum of Dickens. He was very loyal to his friends, incredibly generous, devoted to social causes that he really delivered on, wrote these amazing books, and then at home possibly was a very difficult father figure."

One of the Britain's leading stars of stage and screen, Fiennes had nevertheless had barely any contact with the country's most famous novelist until he started work on the film. "It's true that I was pretty ignorant about Dickens. I'd read Little Dorritt and seen some films, but Dickens had never been prescribed to me and I had never chosen to go through the canon of his work - and in a way that may have been a plus, I came open, and became completely fascinated."
 
The film casts Nelly's torment within the contemporary context of the struggles women faced in Victorian England, almost entirely dependent on the earnings of men. "Mrs Ternan, the mother, tacitly allows this relationship to happen," Fiennes said. "What's she going to do? She risks social ostracisiation for her daughter, but the security and the benefits of support of Dickens perhaps outweigh the risk of breaking the taboo."

It wasn't all strum and drag on set, however. "I had to wear this huge bow tie. I kept saying, it's too much it's too much – but then I looked at the pictures of Dickens and of course it's huge, out to here. So I embraced it." And, as both actor and director, Fiennes was able to weigh in on the two sides of himself. "Ralph Fiennes the actor is very difficult, he's very moody, tempestuous, storms off the set. And Ralph Fiennes the director … is also very difficult."

"Felicity Jones On 'The Invisible Woman' & The Strangest Christmas Gift She Ever Received"

by

Matthew Jacobs

December 23rd, 2013

huffingtonpost.com

Felicity Jones has starred alongside some of Hollywood's most buzzed about young actors, including Andrew Garfield in "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" and Eddie Redmayne in the Stephen Hawking biopic "Theory of Everything." She's pretty open about the latter movie, but, like much of the gossip surrounding the next "Spider-Man" installment, mum's the word for the 29-year-old Jones when it comes to her debut Peter Parker adventure.

All of that, however, is secondary to Jones' latest movie, "The Invisible Woman." A period piece directed by and co-starring Ralph Fiennes, "Woman" tells the oft-forgotten true story of Nelly Ternan, the mistress of Charles Dickens. The illicit love story is based on Claire Tomalin's book of the same name, and it marks Fiennes' second venture from behind the camera following 2011's "Coriolanus." HuffPost Entertainment sat down with Jones to discuss the new movie, and along the way we discovered she's not a fan of physics but she does enjoy kitsch.

“Like Crazy,” your breakout role, was a low-budget picture heavy on improv. This is not. Which do you prefer?

I like both. They test different things in you as an actor, so I’m happy to move between both styles. I mean, the main thing is just being truthful with the character and caring about them, and that’s sort of the focus. And then as an actor, you want to be in different films and different styles and work with different directors, so that’s always the focus.

Do you find an improv setting to be natural for you?

I love improvising. I love collaborating in that way. It’s like extreme sports -- you never know quite what’s going to happen, so there’s a lot of excitement in working that way.

You’ve done a ton of literary projects: “Northanger Abbey,” “Brideshead Revisited,” “The Tempest.” Are you a big reader yourself?
 
I love reading, yeah. I studied literature at university, and since a young age that’s always been a passion of mine.
 
Have you read anything lately that you’d recommend to us?

Yeah, I just read a book called “Life After God,” which I thought was really beautifully written, and I’m just starting “Crime and Punishment.”
 
That’s a big undertaking.

Dostoevsky is a bit heavy, yeah. I don’t just read nihilistic books, though.
 
What did you know about Nelly before being associated with "Invisible Woman"? Were you familiar with her story at all?

I didn’t know about her, and the film in many ways is bringing her to the fore. I’m so happy she’s not going to be buried in history. I do think she wanted to tell her story, of her relationship with Dickens. She was a big, big part of his life, and she shouldn’t be forgotten.

What were your assessments of who Nelly was as a woman?

A lot of it is your gut instinct. I think she was very proud, I think she was very willful, had a very strong sense of self. She didn’t want to be just some floozy mistress; she wanted to retain her dignity and her strength within their relationship. But from the outside, obviously Dickens had a lot of power, and it was a difficult relationship. But I think she had enormous inner strength. I just think about her now if I’m worried, and I think, “What would Nelly do?” She was a real survivor. She had no money. They were so poor, her family, that she sort of struggled for survival and did it.

Even though he’s known for such serious work, I picture working with Ralph Fiennes to be fun-loving. What was his presence like on the set?

He’s very committed and very devoted to his work. He doesn’t take it lightly -- he knows that he’s very privileged to be doing what he’s doing. It’s the seriousness of the endeavor that I respect in him. And it’s not taken on lightly, and I love the way he approaches both acting and directing. It’s absolute focus, and he wants to tell a story as honestly as possible.

What was it like working on someone’s film who’s also acting in the project?

Well, it’s obviously a different environment than I’m used to, but Ralph just created a set where we were really free to explore, and it was very focused and it was just totally about performance, which was a luxury. You don’t get that. Directors often have a million things to be thinking about, so you don’t get that laser focus on creating a performance of integrity. That was an intense but fascinating experience.

Is there a recent part you wish you could have played, or perhaps a famous one you’d love to take on?

I don’t know, I think there’s going to be a fashion of women playing men’s parts. Like, I’d love to play Hamlet.

A reverse Shakespearean kind of thing?

Yeah! Or something just to try. Obviously people like Tilda Swinton have done it. I think that’d be fascinating to try a different psychology.
 
You recently wrapped “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” which I assume required much more physicality than something like “The Invisible Woman” or “Like Crazy.” Did you have to adopt any particular physical regimen to prepare?

I really can’t say that much about it. So, you’ll have to wait and see. It was really good, I had a great time. I really respect everyone involved in the project; they’re all wonderful, and I loved the comics growing up.
 
Oh, did you read them?

Yeah, my brother had the Spider-Man pajama set, and like all kids, we loved cartoons. So it was really cool to put a part of.

Can you tell us whether you’re returning for “Amazing Spider-Man 3”?

You’ll have to wait and see.

You also have “Theory of Everything" coming up. Did you have any physics knowledge before taking the role of Hawking’s wife?

I was so bad at physics in school. Physics and math and chemistry, I was like, “No, I’ll just stick to English and history, thank you very much.” It’s definitely not my world, and I think Stephen Hawking actually is someone who’s made physics a lot more accessible to people. That’s really his legacy, so I enjoyed reading his books.

So we should all go read “A Brief History of Time”?

Yeah, it’s fantastic. But the character I was playing was much more literary and artistic, and so much of the film is about their different attitudes toward the world, their different ideologies.

In keeping with the season, what’s the strangest Christmas present you’ve received?

I once got a vase from an aunt that had a monkey on it.

Do you still have it?

You know what, when I first got it, I hated it. But now I think it’s quite kitsch, so now it has a presence in my life. It’s like fashion -- it’s always changing.
 
Kill, marry or bang: Andrew Garfield, Eddie Redmayne, James Franco.

[laughs] I am definitely not even entertaining that question.
 
Okay, at least tell us which of the three you find the hunkiest.

I can’t, I’ll get into so much trouble. I’m friends with all of them, they’re all lovely.

So they’ll all want to know which of them wins your heart.

They’re all very talented actors.

Of course. Favorite movies of the year?

“Blue is the Warmest Color,” and I actually loved “The Look of Love,” the Michael Winterbottom movie, as well.

What sense would you be most afraid to lose?

I think touch. Can you lose one? Yeah, you can lose sensation. Am I going mad? Touch is a sense, right?

Yes.

What are the five senses? This is how gone from my own humanity I am.

Oh no, you’re not a science person, I get it. Sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.

Yeah. It’s a good name for a movie.

There: your first writing project.

Yeah, let’s do it.

Do you want to write or direct at any point?

At the moment, acting is my focus. But I wouldn’t want to rule anything out.

Well, if so, we just developed the title for your first movie, so you can figure out what that’ll entail. Not physics probably.

Yeah, no way.

I better get some kind of producer credit on that.

Oh, for sure.

Ellen Ternan [Wikipedia]

Post-apocalyptic science fiction by Walter Van Tilburg Clark..."The Portable Phonograph"

It is "...a tale about the last survivors in the world after the total destruction of a war." Not a new theme. Much like Arch Oboler's 1951 film  Five and numerous episodes of The Twilight Zone. It is still worth reading and understanding.

Kiosk from Yahoo Answers wrote...

The contrast between the happiness that the men get from his musical device and the lack of fulfillment this provides for him is interesting. In the world that this story describes, the reader expects the doctor to be happy with all that he has. As the story unfolds, you gain an understanding of the feelings behind his possessions. Doctor Jenkins is a normal character and his feelings are presented in a real manner. The reader can conclude that his personality is not unlike anyone else. What he sees is influenced by the way he is and how he feels. He views things in a way that ultimately makes his feelings of suspicion and greed stronger, therefore never breaking the cycle of how he judges those around him.
 
Text...

The Portable Phonograph

To stream or download the film by John Barnes

Walter Van Tilburg Clark [Wikipedia]

Footnote: Clark is probably best known for his novel  The Ox-Bow Incident .

Deceased--Anne Barton

Anne Barton
1933 to November 16th, 2013

"Shakespeare scholar Anne Barton dies at 80, a graceful, expert voice"

by

Charles McNulty

November 14th, 2013

Los Angeles Times

Anne Barton, one of the 20th century’s foremost Shakespeare scholars, died Monday in Cambridge, England.  She was 80 years old. The announcement was made by Cambridge University, where she was an emeritus professor of English and fellow of Trinity College.

An American who grew up in Westchester County, New York, Bobbyann Roesen set sail for England after graduating from Bryn Mawr in 1954 and spent most of her life on the native soil of her great subject, William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was her destiny. As an undergraduate, she published in “Shakespeare Quarterly” the essay “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” the last paragraph of which contained, in her own words, “the germ” of what became her most important book, “Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play” (1962).

Here she argued that for the playwright the stage, with its mirthful impersonations and flamboyant games, provided a buoyant symbol not of illusion but of reality itself.

She earned a PhD at Cambridge and became the first woman to hold a Fellowship in New College, Oxford before returning to Cambridge, where she rose to prominence as one of the leading authorities in English Renaissance and Early Modern literature. Among her many honors, she was made a fellow of the British Academy.

Her books include "Ben Jonson, Dramatist" (1982), “The Names of Comedy” (1990), “Byron: Don Juan” (1992) and the collection “Essays, Mainly Shakespearean" (1994).

But she is perhaps best known in the U.S. for her introductions to Shakespeare’s comedies in “The Riverside Shakespeare,” the backbreaking tome American undergraduates have been lugging in their knapsacks for generations.

It’s safe to say that through these prefaces Barton awakened countless students -- future academics, theater artists and critics among them -- to the miracle of Shakespeare’s genius. 

A first marriage to William Righter ended in divorce. In 1968, while a university lecturer, she married director John Barton, a pillar of the Royal Shakespeare Company under Peter Hall’s leadership and one of Britain's most influential classical theater directors. Intellectually, it was an ideal match.

Barton’s scholarship is notable for the way it balances psychological nuance with narrative clarity (much like the best of John Barton’s productions). Her graceful prose illuminates a work’s broader historical, political and cultural contexts only to throw into sharper relief the dynamic flux of dramatic relations. For the supremely erudite, Cambridge-educated Bartons, the play was indeed the thing.

At times it seemed as if the entire repertoire of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama, with its growing tonnage of fiercely contentious annotation and exegesis, was at the beck and call of Barton’s memory. No character was too minor, no plot point too negligible, no historical footnote too obscure for her to lose track of, especially when quietly skewering, in the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books, the work of a fellow academic exploiting Shakespeare to promulgate the latest scholarly fad.

A close reader who remained keenly aware of the way literary and social frameworks alter how texts are interpreted, she moved with effortless, undoctrinaire fluidity in her critical method. Exploring the hearts and minds of characters came as naturally to her as it did to Stanislavski-based actors.

But she was equally interested in examining the function of a role in a playwright’s larger dramatic scheme and understood that questions of genre, chronology, source material and textual accuracy were integral to this study. Hers was truly a holistic approach.

Unlike other titans in the field, she never lost sight of the fact that the creation of consciousness -- Shakespeare’s supreme gift, as Harold Bloom excitedly contends in his book “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human” -- was an artistic phenomenon, the DNA being poetic and theatrical, not biological.

I still recall reading her introduction to “As You Like It” in "The Riverside Shakespeare" as a somewhat melancholic graduate student (really, are there any other kind?) and being tingled to alertness by insights that bridged a 400-year old play with my own far less frolicsome situation. About Rosalind, the comedy’s bright protagonist, she recognized a figure every bit as central to her play as Hamlet was to his.

“Like Jaques, Rosalind knows that human beings die and that worms eat them. Like old Corin, she is aware that even the most passionate love diminishes with time, and like Touchstone, that lovers are objectively ridiculous and their airiest flights grounded in the senses. She knows these things immediately and emotionally, not merely in the abstract, and yet they do not sour her gaiety or trivialize the essential seriousness of her commitment to Orlando.”

In “Falstaff and the Comic Community” (contained in “Essays, Mainly Shakespearean”), Barton observed that “Falstaff in Windsor is a stranded leviathan, a man hopelessly out of his element, beached and floundering. Yet she immediately pointed out that “he remains able to run rings round everyone else” in a town filled “with people engaged in a losing battle with the subtleties of the English language.”
Absorbing the inspirational model of Shakespeare, Barton’s prose possessed a classical poise seldom encountered in today’s jargon-riddled academic mewlings. Her work continues to remind us that rigor and elegance needn’t be sworn enemies.

“Humane, learned, un-showily stylish and at times moving in their tender intelligence” is how the literary critic A.D. Nuttall described the contents of “Essays, Mainly Shakespearean,” and it is these characteristics that enabled Barton to stand out in a crowded scholarly field, a figure as formidably bright as any of Shakespeare’s cleverest heroines.

Teens and ethical sci-fi

"Ethical Sci-fi in YA Lit"

by

Guest Blogger

November 12th, 2013

The Hub

I can still remember the way I felt reading the last sentence of Ender’s Game by 2008 Edwards Award winner Orson Scott Card some twenty years ago.  Indeed, each subsequent reading has left me with a similar sense of profound sadness, self-reflection, and an inexpressible ache to make the world a better place.  I’ve since read other novels that have inspired equally, if not more complex emotions but, at the age of twelve, Ender’s Game was the first time I can recall being so deeply affected by the underlying message of a book.  The story made me think not only about the ways in which human beings willfully harm others but also about my own complicity within that.  It was an exercise in compassion—a mirror in which I could see myself, others, and society itself more clearly.   As an avid sci-fi fan, I strongly believe that the best sci-fi, the kind that stays with you, succeeds in doing just that.  It makes you think both about yourself and about the world you inhabit.  It entreats you to reconsider the status quo and challenges you to question where we are headed as a species.  And like Ender’s Game, the very best sci-fi manages to both entertain and raise ethical issues.

As Ender’s Game finds itself in the limelight again due to the recent movie adaptation, I thought that this would be a good time to celebrate other ethical sci-fi titles. Books, whose main purpose, more than to entertain, are to explore issues that plague society today and to push us to ponder their future impact.  Think 1984 versus Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Let’s start then with a sci-fi classic in the making, M.T. Anderson’s excellent book Feed (a 2003 Best Books for Young Adults and Ultimate Teen Bookshelf selection).  On the surface, the book appears to be a simple love story gone wrong.  Boy meets girl, they fall in love, he can’t handle the complications of her life, they break up.  However, Feed is also a masterful study of the negative effects of consumerism, our dependency on technology, and our inability to “unplug.”   The love story allows us to feel more deeply the ramifications of this dependency on both consumerism and technology, as does Anderson’s remarkable narrative voice.  Indeed, it’s impossible to read the final chapters without experiencing a dawning horror of what could await us.  When recommending this book to others, I often say that of all the sci-fi I’ve read, it most accurately portrays the future that looms ahead. Interestingly, Feed has also been in the news recently in conjunction with Google Glass, an invention that arguably is bringing us closer to that very future.  As sci-fi becomes reality, read Feed to better understand the implications of our current relationship with technology.

Orleans by Sherri L. Smith received strong reviews when it came out earlier this year but I find that many have not yet read it.  More’s the pity, as the book deftly examines issues of race, class, and privilege in America.  Set in a ravaged New Orleans in 2025, the book reads as a commentary on Hurricane Katrina and our collective responsibility in how the US government responded to it.  The book begins with timeline of past and future hurricanes that ravage the Gulf Coast resulting in an outbreak of Delta Fever that decimates the population.  The government’s response is to “quarantine” the area, a euphemism for essentially abandoning an entire population to its death.  The strength of the book lies in its examination of the human will to survive at all costs… and the costs are disturbingly high.  From an ethical standpoint, Orleans calls into question inherent assumptions about race and privilege and forces us to consider whom America considers worth saving and whom it is willing to sacrifice.  Not for the faint-hearted, this is definitely a book for older teens and adults and is well worth reading, particularly as it hits so close to home.

Having mentioned 1984 at the start of this post, I would be remiss in not discussing Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.  The most didactic of the novels discussed so far, Little Brother devotes itself whole-heartedly to the ethics of power—how it’s used, who uses it, and how to take it back.  The book centers on a group of techno-savvy teenagers grappling with the increasing infringements on their civil liberties after a terrorist attack.  Doctorow’s unflinching portrayal of interrogation, torture, and the psychological aftermath of both will inspire a great deal of reflection and discussion about the rights of citizens and the responsibility of governments.  If you’ve ever had the good fortune to hear Cory Doctorow speak, this novel captures the passion he brings to the stage—part primer, part adventure, part unabashed tirade, Little Brother is Doctorow at his best.

Given the recent uproar over the newly released Ender’s Game movie due to Orson Scott Card’s controversial political views, it is perhaps ironic that I wrote this post on the topic of ethical sci-fi.  And yet, whether or not readers agree with the author’s personal views, Ender’s Game continues to change the minds and worlds of the young people who read it.  Its dual themes of empathy and the ethicality of war remain as relevant today as they were when it was written almost twenty years ago.

And maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here: as a young teen, Ender’s Game made me question the world around me and my place in it.  In opening that door, it led me to many other ethical sci-fi books from The Handmaid’s Tale to The Dispossessed to 2312.  I don’t know if I can claim to be a better person for having read these books (although I hope so) but I can certainly say that I am a more critically engaged one.  That critical engagement allows me to continue to embrace the message of Ender’s Game while also acknowledging the complex nature of the author/audience relationship and the ambiguity of authorial intent.  Here’s hoping that some of the books above will be similarly thought-provoking for you!

Orwell's Burma residence

"George Orwell’s Burmese Home Comes Back to Life"

by

Nang Lwin

May 4th, 2013

THE IRRAWADDY

An ancient building in northwest Burma, once home to George Orwell, will be restored for visitors after a long period of disrepair under the former military regime.

Now largely abandoned, the old red building in Sagaing Division stands at the end of a narrow path overgrown with grass. Two trees flanking the edifice enhance the seclusion of the home where the famous British writer lived during British colonialism, plotting parts of his famous book “Burmese Days.”

“We started talking to community leaders about repairing the building, and now we’re collaborating with tourism agents,” said Thaung Htike Oo, a township administrator. “The repairs will be complete this year.”

Orwell came to Burma as an Indian Civil Service officer, assigned in 1926 to a remote town in Sagaing Division along the west bank of the Irrawaddy River. The town, Katha, was the inspiration for the fictional district of Kyauktada in “Burmese Days,” which was published in 1934. The book presents the dark side of British colonialism in Burma, then part of the British Indian empire, with biting descriptions of discrimination against the Burmese as well as feelings of isolation among the British colonial officers.

Orwell’s former two-storey home is now owned by the township’s administrative department, with some civil servants and their families taking up residence there.

The historical building has never been repaired; vines snake up cracked, concrete walls, while the doors hang off their hinges. The floor lies beneath piles of garbage, with insects rummaging between. Weeds curve alongside the fireplace and dust covers the railing up a broken staircase.

Soon, however, the township hopes to breathe new life into the neglected residence, and to attract tourist dollars in the process.

Foreigners with an interest in the famous British author have long journeyed to Katha to view for themselves the landscapes painted in the novel.

“Tourists choose the Irrawaddy River cruise to Katha,” said Daw Tint Tint Lwin, managing director of Irrawaddy Princess River Cruise. “All the tourists want to see the building” where Orwell lived.

In February, news spread that Orwell’s former residence might be torn down by investors to make room for a skate park, but plans for renovation ultimately won out.

“The value of our colonial heritage may fade away if they turn this place into a skating ground,” Daw Tint Tint Lwin said.

Still, she stressed that reconstructing and repainting the crumbling building should be done carefully.

“We want to charge a fee for entering and visiting the building,” she said. “With that income, we can repair and maintain the building without disturbing its historical value.”

She criticized the building’s current tenants for failing to care for the space.

“They’ve put two [township] employees’ families in this building, and now it looks like a local hut,” she said. “All the buildings, including the British Club and tennis court, need to be repaired and maintained properly so this place can be a tourist attraction with entry fees.”
The British Club, which makes frequent appearances in “Burmese Days,” was a popular gathering spot for British colonial officers and their families to socialize on the verandah with a view of the Irrawaddy River. Coconut trees line the road leading to the club, which was built on a hill and is separated from a tennis quart by an open field and living quarters for laborers.

Orwell was born in India in 1903 and moved with his family to England one year later. He joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in 1922 but despised colonial life and resigned several years later. In addition to “Burmese Days,” he is known writing the dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Animal Farm.”

"Excerpt: 'Finding George Orwell In Burma'"

by

Emma Larkin

July 28th, 2010

NPR

George Orwell, ' I said slowly. 'G-e-o-r-g-e O-r-w-e-l-l.' But the old Burmese man just kept shaking his head.

We were sitting in the baking-hot front room of his house in a sleepy port town in Lower Burma. The air was oppressive and muggy. I could hear mosquitoes whining impatiently around my head, and I was about to give up. The man was a well-known scholar in Burma, and I knew he was familiar with Orwell. But he was elderly; cataracts had turned his eyes an oystery blue, and his hands trembled as he readjusted his sarong. I wondered if he was losing his memory but, after several failed attempts, I made one final stab.

'George Orwell,' I repeated — 'the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four.' The old man's eyes suddenly lit up. He looked at me with a brilliant flash of recognition, slapped his forehead gleefully, and said, 'You mean the prophet!'

A year before George Orwell died in 1950, his typewriter was confiscated. Orwell lay tucked under an electric blanket in a small wooden chalet in the green and pleasant heart of the Cotswolds, dying of pulmonary tuberculosis. Piled around his sickbed were a variety of books: tomes on Stalin and on German atrocities in the Second World War, a study of English labourers in the nineteenth century, a few Thomas Hardy novels, some early Evelyn Waugh. Under the bed was a secret stash of rum.

The doctors at the sanatorium where Orwell was being treated had advised him to stop writing. Any kind of writing, they said, would tire him out. What he needed was total rest. Both his lungs were clogged with lesions, and he was coughing up blood. The disease had now reached a critical stage, and doctors were not hopeful of his chances of recovery. Even if he did survive, he might never be able to write again — or at least not with the same intensity he was used to. Orwell, however, continued to write. He scribbled letters, composed essays, reviewed books, and corrected proofs of his soon-to-be-published novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. And, simmering in his fevered mind, was an idea for another book: a novella entitled 'A Smoking Room Story', which would revisit Burma, a place he had not been to since his youth.

Orwell had lived in Burma in the 1920s as an officer of the Imperial Police Force. For five years he dressed in khaki jodhpurs and shining black boots. Armed with guns and a sense of moral superiority, the Imperial Police Force patrolled the countryside and kept this far-flung corner of the British Empire in line. Then, suddenly and without warning, he returned to England and handed in his notice. Just as abruptly, he began his career as a writer. Exchanging his real name, 'Eric Arthur Blair', for the pen-name 'George Orwell', he donned the rags of a tramp and marched off into the dank London nights to collect the stories of the down-at-heel. Orwell based his first novel, Burmese Days, on his experiences in the Far East, but it was his later novels such as Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four that would turn him into one of the most respected and visionary writers of the twentieth century.

It is a particularly uncanny twist of fate that these three novels effectively tell the story of Burma's recent history. The link begins with Burmese Days, which chronicles the country's period under British colonialism. Not long after Burma became independent from Britain in 1948, a military dictator sealed off the country from the outside world, launched 'The Burmese Way to Socialism', and turned Burma into one of the poorest countries in Asia. The same story is told in Orwell's Animal Farm, an allegorical tale about a socialist revolution gone wrong in which a group of pigs overthrow the human farmers and run the farm into ruin. Finally, in Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell's description of a horrifying and soulless dystopia paints a chillingly accurate picture of Burma today, a country ruled by one of the world's most brutal and tenacious dictatorships.

In Burma there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just one novel about the country, but three: a trilogy comprised of Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

As I walked down a busy street in Mandalay on my first visit to Burma, in 1995, a Burmese man strode purposefully towards me twirling a black umbrella. He smiled brightly and said, 'Spread our need of democracy to the rest of the world — the people are so tired.' Then he turned around and walked briskly away. And that was it: one of the few, fleeting glimpses I had that all is not as it seems in Burma.

During the three weeks I spent wandering through postcard-perfect scenes of bustling markets, glittering pagodas and faded British hill stations I found it hard to believe I was travelling through a country that has one of the worst records for human-rights abuse in the world. To me, this is the most staggering thing about Burma: that the oppression of an entire nation of some 50 million people can be completely hidden from view. A vast network of Military Intelligence spies and their informers ensures that no one can do or say anything that might threaten the regime. The Burmese media — books, magazines, movies and music — are controlled by a strict censorship board and government propaganda is churned out not only through newspapers and television, but also in schools and universities. These methods of reality-control are kept firmly in place by the invisible, though ever present, threat of torture and imprisonment.

For an outsider like myself, unable to see beyond the façade the generals have created, it was impossible to imagine the daily fear and precariousness of living in such a state. It was during my efforts to understand this aspect of Burmese life that I became fascinated by Orwell. All his novels explore the idea of individuals being trapped within their environment, controlled by their family, the society around them or an all-powerful government. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he conjured up the ultimate vision of oppression, even giving us the language with which to describe it: 'Big Brother', 'Room 101', 'Newspeak'.

As I reread Orwell's novels — books I had not read since my schooldays — I became curious about his personal connection with Burma. What was it that had made him trade his career in the colonies for that of a writer? And why, after nearly a quarter of a century away from Burma, did he look to the country for inspiration while he lay on his deathbed? I began to imagine that Orwell had seen something in Burma, had had some thread of an idea, that had worked its way into all his writing. I looked through the various biographies that have been written about Orwell, but their authors seemed to underplay the significance of Burma and, as far I could gather, none of them had ever conducted any research in the places where Orwell spent five life-changing years. The towns and cities where Orwell was posted span the geographical heart of the country and, in a sense, it is still possible to experience Burma as Orwell knew it — almost half a century of military dictatorship has given it the air of a country frozen in time. But a journey through Orwell's Burma would lead through an even eerier and much more terrifying landscape: that of a real-life Nineteen Eighty-Four where Orwell's nightmare visions are being played out with a gruelling certainty.

Foreign writers and journalists are denied entry to Burma. Occasionally some are able to slip into the country posing as tourists, but if they are discovered their notebooks and photographic film are confiscated and they are swiftly deported. For the Burmese people they interview, the repercussions are infinitely greater. Under the country's 1950 Emergency Provisions Act, providing foreigners with information that the regime considers inimical is punishable with a seven-year prison sentence. Though I worked as a journalist, I rarely wrote about Burma and so it was still possible for me to blend in among tourists or the small expatriate community of business people who are granted long-stay visas. In basing a book on my experiences there were concessions to be made: I would have to change the names of the Burmese people I spoke with and, in some cases, their locations. But, if I was careful, it would be possible to forge a pathway through this seemingly impenetrable country.

Before I left for Burma, I went to the George Orwell Archive in London to look at Orwell's final manuscript. When Orwell died, in 1950, he had only just begun the project. 'A Smoking Room Story' was planned as a novella of thirty to forty thousand words which told how a fresh-faced young British man was irrevocably changed after living in the humid tropical jungles of colonial Burma. In an inky scrawl on the first three pages of a notebook bound in marbled paper Orwell had written an outline for the tale and a short vignette. I flicked through the rest of the book and found the pages blank. The rest of the story, I realized, lay waiting in Burma.

Finding George Orwell In Burma

by

Emma Larkin

ISBN-10: 0143037110
ISBN-13: 978-0143037118

Decades of adventure with Tom Swift

Victor Appleton II's Tom Swift and his Outpost in Space [aka Sky Wheel]

Dustjacket data...

A space station 22,300 miles above the earth is Tom Swift Jr.'s latest project!

Tom's plans for his gigantic hub-and-spoke outpost of the universe calls for twelve laboratories. Solar batteries will be produced in one laboratory, another will be a celestial observatory, and another a radio broadcasting and TV station relaying programs over one third of the earth.

But the project is beset from the start by a fiendish enemy, and also that weird phantom of outer space, Zero Gravity.

Tom comes to grips with the problem of weightlessness by inventing a Zero chamber. Here, in order to master the helpless feeling encountered in space, men are trained to develop a new set of muscular reflexes. Crewmen crawling like flies up and down the walls and across the ceiling of Zero G creates momentary comic relief.

But this is only a prelude to an exciting drama which takes place on a Pacific island, where Tom's rocket fleet is about to blast off. Strange warnings that terrify the natives nearly wreck Tom's plans. How the young scientist overcomes all obstacles and launches his space station makes a gripping book. And each technical detail of this fascinating story has been carefully checked. For those who enjoy the thrill of adventure and the chill of mystery, Outpost In Space is must reading.

Public domain books

Victor Appleton [Wikipedia]

Tom Swift [Wikipedia]

And those wonderful "Tom Swiftie" phrases [Wikipedia]

Samples...

" I'm an ordained minister," said Tom reverently.

"I've struck oil," Tom said, crudely.

"As soon as the rain stops, we'll break camp," said Tom intently.

"Boy, that sure took the wind out of my sails!" said Tom disgustedly.

"Boy, will I give YOU a haircut!" said Tom barbarously.

"Buy me something to drink?" said Tom dryly.

"Get away from the dynamite," Tom said explosively.

"Give me some more macaroni and cheese, and I'll tell you," said Tom  craftily.

"I'd love some Chinese food," said Tom wantonly.

"I collect fairy tales," said Tom grimly.

"I commanded a group of ships for a week," Tom said fleetingly.

"As my sole heir, you get it all," said Tom willfully.

"I forgot what to buy," Tom said listlessly.

"I hate pies with crumb bases," said Tom crustily.

"I joined the Lion's Club," said Tom pride fully.

"I just returned from Japan," Tom said disoriented.

"I know all the wherefores," said Tom wisely.

"I MUST patch this coat." Tom said raggedly.

"I need a home run hitter," Tom said ruthlessly.

"I need a pencil sharpener," said Tom bluntly.

"I only get Newsweek," said Tom timelessly.

"I still haven't struck oil," said Tom boringly.

"I think I'll use a different font," said Tom boldly.

"I want to date around," said Tom unsteadily.

"I was removed from office," said Tom disappointedly.

"I won the daily double," Tom cried hoarsely.

"I don't like hot dogs," Tom said frankly.

"I'll pay off that customs official," said Tom dutifully.

"I'll try and dig it up for you," Tom said gravely.

"I'm back from my lobotomy," said Tom absentmindedly.

"I've made a study of girls," said Tom lassitudinously.

"It's the maid's night off," said Tom helplessly.

"Let's get married," said Tom engagingly.

"Let's visit tombs," said Tom cryptically.

"Look at those newborn kittens," said Tom literally.

"Mush!" Tom said huskily.

"My pencil is dull," said Tom pointlessly.

Is philosophy literature?

"Is Philosophy Literature?"

by

Jim Holt

June 30th, 2012

The New York Times

Is philosophy literature? Do people read philosophy for pleasure? Of course it is, and of course they do.

People savor the aphorisms of Nietzsche, the essays of Schopenhauer, the philosophical novels of Sartre. They read the dialogues of Plato (and they would doubtless read the dialogues of Aristotle too, had Western civilization not been so careless as to mislay them). Some even claim to enjoy the more daunting treatises in the philosophical canon. "When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza's latest," Bertie Wooster swankily announces in one of P.G. Wodehouse's "Jeeves" novels.

Now let me narrow my query: Does anybody read analytic philosophy for pleasure? Is this kind of philosophy literature? Here you might say, "Certainly not!" Or you might say, "What the heck is analytic philosophy?"

Allow me to address the latter reply first. "Analytic" philosophy is the kind that is practiced these days by the vast majority of professors in philosophy departments throughout the English-speaking world. It's reputed to be rather dry and technical - long on logical rigor, short on lyrical profundity. Analytic philosophy got its start in Cambridge in the first decade of the 20th century, when Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore revolted against the rather foggy continental idealism prevailing among English philosophers at the time. Under their influence, and that of Ludwig Wittgenstein (who arrived in Cambridge in 1912 to study with Russell), philosophers came to see their task as consisting not in grand metaphysical system-building, but in the painstaking analysis of language. This, they thought, would enable them to lay bare the logical structure of reality and to put all the old philosophical perplexities to rest.

Today, analytic philosophy has a broader scope than it used to. (Many of its qualities were examined in a previous post in this series by Gary Gutting, "Bridging the Analytic-Continental Divide.") It's less obsessed with dissecting language; it's more continuous with the sciences. (This is partly due to the American philosopher Willard Quine, who argued that language really has no fixed system of meanings for philosophers to analyze.) Yet whether they are concerned with the nature of consciousness, of space-time or of the good life, analytic philosophers continue to lay heavy stress on logical rigor in their writings. The result, according to Martha Nussbaum (herself a sometime member of the tribe), is a prevailing style that is "correct, scientific, abstract, hygienically palid" - a style meant to serve as "a kind of all-purpose solvent." Timothy Williamson, the current occupant of the illustrious Wykeham Chair of Logic at Oxford, makes a virtue of the "long haul of technical reflection" that is analytic philosophy today. Does it bore you? Well, he says, too bad. "Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention-spans."

This kind of philosophy, whatever its intellectual merits, doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun. And it doesn't sound like literature.

But what is literature? That in itself might appear to be a philosophical question. Yet the most persuasive answer, to my mind, was supplied by a novelist, Evelyn Waugh. (Well, not just a novelist - also the most versatile master of English prose in the last 100 years.) "Literature," Waugh declared, "is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance." Something doesn't have to rhyme or tell a story to be considered literature. Even a VCR instruction manual might qualify, or a work of analytic philosophy. (Waugh, as it happens, was not a fan of analytic philosophy, dismissing it as "a parlor game of logical quibbles.")

And what is "the right use of language"? What distinguishes literature from mere communication, or sheer trash? Waugh had an answer to this too. "Lucidity, elegance, individuality": these are the three essential traits that make a work of prose "memorable and unmistakable," that make it literature.

So how does the writing of professional philosophers of the past 100 years or so fare in the light of these three criteria? Well, it gets high marks for lucidity - which, by the way, it not the same thing as simplicity, or easy intelligibility. (Think of Henry James.) Some prominent analytic philosophers can be turbid in their writing, even preposterously so - the recently deceased Michael Dummett, an admirable thinker in so many other ways, comes to mind. Yet precision of expression is, among their ranks, far more honored in the observance than in the breach. Indeed, it's something of a professional fetish (and not a bad guide to truth).

Individuality? Here too analytic philosophers, the greatest of them anyway, shine. Stylistically speaking, there is no mistaking Willard Quine (spare, polished, elaborately lucid) for, say, Elizabeth Anscombe (painstaking, imperious). Or David K. Lewis (colloquially natural, effortlessly clever) for John Searle (formidable, patient, sardonic). Or Thomas Nagel (intricately nuanced, rich in negative capability) for Philippa Foot (dry, ironically homely, droll).

Finally, we come to elegance. This honorific has been overused to the point of meaningless, but Waugh had something definite in mind by it: "Elegance is the quality in a work of art which imparts direct pleasure." And pleasure, though by no means an infallible guide to literary value, is (as W.H. Auden observed) the least fallible guide. What does it mean to take pleasure in a piece of prose? Is there a sort of tingle you feel as you read it? That can't very well be, since then it would be the tingle you were enjoying, not the prose. (And wouldn't such a  tingle distract you from your reading?) Oddly, one of the most pleasurable pieces of analytic philosophy I've come across is itself an article entitled "Pleasure," where, in a mere nine pages, all the reigning understandings of pleasure are gently deflated. Its author, the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-76), was among the dominant figures in mid-century analytic philosophy. He was also a supremely graceful prose stylist, the coiner of phrases like "the ghost in the machine," and, not incidentally, a votary of Jane Austen. (Asked if he ever read novels, Ryle was reputed to have replied, "Oh yes - all six, every year.")

Ryle may head the hedonic honor roll of analytic philosophy, but the roll is a long one. It includes all the philosophers I named above - especially Quine, whose classic article "On What There Is" can be read over and over again, like a poem. It also includes the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam, whose logical lump is leavened by a relaxed command of language and a gift for imaginative thought experiments. It includes younger philosophers (well, younger than 65) like Kwame Anthony Appiah and Colin McGinn - both of whom, in addition to their technical and not-so-technical philosophical work, have written novels. (One of Appiah's is a philosophical murder-mystery bearing the title, "Another Death in Venice.") And it certainly includes Bertrand Russell, who was actually awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature - although not, I hasten to add, for his work on Principia Mathematica.

Literary pleasures can turn up even in the most seemingly abstruse reaches of analytic philosophy. Take the case of Saul Kripke - widely (though not unanimously) considered the one true genius in the profession today. Kripke's work can be dauntingly technical. The first volume of his collected papers, recently published by Oxford University Press under the arresting title "Philosophical Troubles," will be a treasure trove to his fellow philosophers of logic and language, but it is not for the casual reader. However, an earlier work of his, the revolutionary "Naming and Necessity," is so lucidly, inventively and even playfully argued that even a newcomer to analytic philosophy will find it hard to put down. The book is actually a transcription of three lectures Kripke gave, extemporaneously and without notes, at Princeton in January 1970 - hence its lovely conversational tone.

Ranging over deep matters like metaphysical necessity, the a priori and the mind-body problem, Kripke proceeds by way of a dazzling series of examples involving Salvador Dalí and Sir Walter Scott, the standard meter stick in Paris, Richard Nixon (plus David Fry's impersonation of him), and an identity-like logical relation Kripke calls "schmidentity." There is not a dogmatic or pompous word in the lectures - and not a dull one either. Kripke the analytic philosopher reveals himself to be a literary stylist of the first water (just as, say, Richard Feynman the physicist did). The reader more than forgives Kripke when he remarks at one point, apropos of his unwillingness to give a thoroughly worked-out theory of reference, "I'm sort of too lazy at the moment."

I hope I have clinched my case for analytic philosophy as belles lettres. But perhaps I should give the last word to a real literary man, John Milton, who prophetically wrote of Kripke, Russell and their kind:

How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbèd as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute
And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets...

[Jim Holt is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books, and the author of the forthcoming, "Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story."]

Deceased--Dmitri Nabokov

Dmitri Nabokov
May 10th, 1934 to February 22nd, 2012

"Dmitri Nabokov dies at 77; only child of acclaimed novelist Vladimir Nabokov"

The younger Nabokov spent much of his life trying to carve a life away from the shadow of his father. But he always returned to protecting his legacy, translating and editing his work while pursuing careers as an opera singer and race car driver.

February 26th, 2012

latimes.com

Dmitri Nabokov, the only child of acclaimed novelist Vladimir Nabokov who helped protect and translate his father's work while pursuing careers as an opera singer and race car driver, has died. He was 77.

The younger Nabokov died Wednesday at a hospital in Vevey, Switzerland, after a long illness, said literary agent Andrew Wylie.

Dmitri spent much of his life trying to carve a life away from the shadow of his father, considered one of the premier writers of the 20th century for such books as "Lolita" and "Pale Fire."

The tall, broad-shouldered son bore a striking resemblance to his father. Harvard-educated Dmitri was a playboy who began to race cars competitively in 1962 and maintained an active professional operatic career as a basso profundo until 1982.

But Dmitri always returned to protecting his father's literary legacy, translating and editing his father's plays, poems, stories, the novella "The Enchanter" and "Selected Letters."

"My father is gradually marching — with his two favorite writers, Pushkin and Joyce — arm in arm into the pantheon to join the greatest of all, Shakespeare, who is waiting for them," Dmitri told the Associated Press in 2009. "I like to think that I did my bit to keep things on track."

After the success of "Lolita," he translated his father's "Invitation to a Beheading" from Russian and wrote the memoir "On Revisiting Father's Room" after his father died in 1977. After his mother died in 1991, he sold the remainder of his father's archive to the New York Public Library and attended conferences dedicated to him.

In 2009, Dmitri decided to publish his father's final, fragmentary novel, "The Origin of Laura," written on index cards during the last years of Vladimir's life. It was a controversial act that his son said went against the wishes of his father, who had asked that "Laura" be burned.

Dmitri Nabokov was born in 1934 in Berlin and as a child lived "a real drifter's life," he later said. He was living in Paris with his father and Jewish mother, Vera, when the family fled the Nazis in 1940 and came to the U.S.

Vladimir borrowed money to send his son to Harvard in 1951. He reported that Dmitri's interests there were "mountaineering, girls, music, track, tennis and his studies, in that order."

After graduating from college, Dmitri served in theU.S. Army, resuming his voice studies after his discharge in 1957.

The elder Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945 but returned to Europe in 1961, settling in Switzerland to be near his son, who was living in Italy.

Dmitri never married but believed he would have made a great father, much like his own was, he told The Times in 1989: "It was a very rich relationship. We were very good friends.... He made my life infinitely richer, more entertaining and equipped me for creative endeavors of my own."

"Dmitri Nabokov, Steward of Father’s Literary Legacy, Dies at 77"

by

Daniel E. Slotnik

February 25th, 2012

The New York Times

Dmitri Nabokov, the son of Vladimir Nabokov, who tended to the legacy of his father with the posthumous publication of a volume of personal letters, an unpublished novella and an unfinished novel that his father had demanded be burned, died on Wednesday in Vevey, Switzerland. He was 77.

Mr. Nabokov was hospitalized for a lung infection in January and never recovered, Andrew Wylie, the agent for the Nabokov estate, said.

In contrast with his father, who was said to focus on literature and lepidoptery to the exclusion of all else, Dmitri Nabokov was a bon vivant, a professional opera singer, a race car driver and a mountain climber.

He was also devoted to the full range of his father’s work, including the early Russian writings like “King, Queen, Knave,” the English-language masterpiece “Lolita” and the unfinished novel “The Original of Laura.” He translated his father’s early Russian works, including the novel “The Gift” and the short story collection “Tyrants Destroyed.”

He also wrote a memoir, “On Revisiting Father’s Room,” which explored their relationship as well as his father’s life and work. Mr. Nabokov also countered the widely held perception of his father as cool and distant, describing a “trusting, gentle nature.”

“If there is a quality overlooked in his writing by some of the more obtuse commentators,” he wrote, “it is that gentleness, coupled with a total honesty on every plane and an utter freedom from anything cruel, cheap or mean.”

In his book, Mr. Nabokov described an unpublished manuscript that he said “would have been Father’s most brilliant novel, the most concentrated distillation of his creativity, but whose release in incomplete form he expressly forbade.” Vladimir Nabokov’s widow and Dmitri’s mother, Véra, never burned the handwritten notecards that made up the novel, and in 2009 the younger Mr. Nabokov published it. The volume included a text of the book, in the order that the younger Mr. Nabokov believed his father had intended, but also facsimiles of the notecards, which could be detached and arranged in whatever order the reader preferred.

In an introduction, he wrote that his “father’s shade” would not “have opposed the release of ‘Laura’ once ‘Laura’ had survived the hum of time this long.”

In “Laura,” Mr. Nabokov “imagines the death of his protagonist, a writer and neurologist named Philip, as a sort of Nietzschean act of will, as an exercise in self-erasure conducted body part by body part, beginning with his toes,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in a review for The New York Times. “It is the ultimate fantasy of a writer who wants to exert complete control over the narrative of his own life.”

Ms. Kakutani said the book did “a disservice to a writer who deeply cherished precision and was practiced in the art of revision,” but she said it would “beckon and beguile Nabokov fans.”

Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov, an only child, was born May 10, 1934, in Berlin. In 1937, the family fled Germany for France and by 1940 had made its way to New York.

Mr. Nabokov concentrated on history and literature at Harvard and graduated in 1955. He also began training for the opera at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass.

In the late 1950s, Mr. Nabokov helped his father translate his novel “Invitation to a Beheading.” In 1959 he traveled to Italy and began training with a singing coach at La Scala in Milan. He later made his operatic debut in “La Bohème” alongside Luciano Pavarotti, then a novice tenor. An imposing presence onstage at well over six feet tall, he continued to sing professionally until 1982.

He also raced cars competitively until 1965.

In 1986, he published his translation of “The Enchanter,” a never-published 1939 novella by his father widely considered a forerunner of “Lolita.”

After his mother died in 1991, Mr. Nabokov moved into her apartment in Montreux, where he oversaw the Nabokov estate and where he lived at his death. He never married and has no immediate survivors.

In his memoir, Mr. Nabokov recalled one of his last exchanges with his father, who died in 1977. They spoke of butterflies, and of a bucolic valley near their home in Switzerland that they had always meant to explore.

“Tears suddenly welled in Father’s eyes,” Mr. Nabokov wrote. “I asked him why. He replied that a certain butterfly was already on the wing; and his eyes told me he no longer hoped that he would live to pursue it again. Nor would he ever visit that enchanted mountain valley on the far side of the lake. But perhaps, in Father’s memory, I shall.”

Dmitri Nabokov [Wikipedia]


Vladimir Nabokov...the lepidopterist

Nabokov's "Pale Fire"