Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0003129, Sat, 23 May 1998 08:29:12 -0700

Subject
Re: Query: Nabokov, Anais Nin, Sartre (fwd)
Date
Body
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: John_Lavagnino@Brown.edu


There's a piece by Simone de Beauvoir called "Brigitte Bardot and the
Lolita Syndrome" that was published in Esquire in August 1959,
pp 32-38. But it's actually only got a few lines on Lolita. Her
autobiographical volume La force des choses (Gallimard, 1963) has a
paragraph on how she liked Lolita and disliked Doctor Zhivago. But
none of this involves any hint of personal acquaintance with Nabokov.

According to Deirdre Bair's biography of 1995, Anais Nin was annoyed
by the success of Lolita, but she made some money for awhile importing
copies of Lolita (and of Henry Miller's books) from Paris and selling
them in the United States with a hefty markup. And in volume 6 of her
published diary, Nin says that Nabokov was one of the writers she
sought out--- but there's no more about this than his bare name on a
list, and Bair at least doesn't say anything about any actual meeting
between them. Sylvia Paine in 1981 published a book called Beckett,
Nabokov, Nin, but I don't have it at hand and don't recall whether it
says anything biographical.

John Lavagnino