One of the attractions of Nabokov's view of literature is that although (or because) he scoffed at any idea of readerly independence he scarcely ever wanted to separate the writer's interests from the reader's. He was prepared to indulge in a kind of crazed fusion of the two in his commentary on Eugene Onegin, and to parody that madness in Pale Fire. When in his afterword to Lolita he defined his ideal of 'aesthetic bliss' in literature he was speaking as a reader and a writer - to be precise as 'neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction' but of something else - and when late in life he told the New York Times what he was currently reading he listed three books: a translation of Dante's Inferno, a book on North American butterflies, and his own novel The Original of Laura.

LRB 7 January 2010 | PDF Download