"In his fiction, marked always by shimmering prose, he abjured the
commonplace and portrayed madness, solipsism, sexual deviance, and individual
consciousness in highly innovative and indelible ways. The influence of the
Russian-born writer on American culture is perhaps most readily observed...
Vladimir Nabokov, writer, metaphysician, lepidopterist, and chess aficionado,
was born on April 22, 1899. In his fiction, marked always by shimmering prose,
he abjured the commonplace and portrayed madness, solipsism, sexual deviance,
and individual consciousness in highly innovative and indelible ways. The
influence of the Russian-born writer on American culture is perhaps most readily
observed in the ways in which "nymphet" and "Lolita" have gained fresh meaning
in our lexicon. As the author once said, "I am probably
responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters
Lolita any more." - Rhoda Feng
"Also belatedly, I’m posting about the use of the River Styx- and more
broadly the use of water all together- as imagery in Lolita.
“He did not use a fountain pen which fact, as any psychoanalyst
will tell you, meant that the patient was a repressed undinist. One
mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx (250).” Water shows
up frequently in Lolita, though I wasn’t too sure what to make of this.
Rivers, fountains, toilet flushes, but beyond this Nabokov uses watery imagery
as a means for description often. The major water reference is the sea, where
Nabokov first develops his passion for nymphets. It is in the princedom by
the sea that his interaction with Annabel starts, sparking the action of the
rest of his life [ ]..."