Laurence Hochard refers to Michaël Wood's article on
Nabokov:... ".. The implication, clearly, is that a writer cannot have two
languages," LH adds: " ... as a man cannot have two
loves.."
Jansy Mello: Nabokov, in SO, observes that
"a writer's talent is his passport." And his American talents are confirmed by
the way he altered a popular saying when he described himself as being "as
American as apple pie,"* to play with sound (apple, April) and image
in order to renew and transform it into his own brand of American. It seems
that he embraces the general while, at the same time, by his apprehension of
details and experstise, he turns it into something uniquely his. Magic..
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney offers a well-fundamented discussion about this
matter in
www.jstor.org/stable/489873 -
The original interview can be found online: "There is
no doubt that Nabokov feels as a tragic loss the conspiracy of history that
deprived him of his native Russia, and that brought him in middle life to doing
his life's work in a language that is not that of his first dreams. However, his
frequent apologies for his grasp of English clearly belong in the context of
Nabokov's special mournful joking: he means it, he does not mean it, he is
grieving for his loss, he is outraged if anyone criticizes his style, he
pretends to be just a poor lonely foreigner, he is as American “as April in
Arizona” ."
Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction No. 40 Interviewed by
Herbert Gold.
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* *wiki: "a saying in the United States, meaning 'typically American.'
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, apple pie became a symbol of American
prosperity and national pride. A newspaper article published in 1902 declared
that “No pie-eating people can be permanently vanquished.")