Home » Nabokov and poetic justice: the artist as scientist

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Nabokov and poetic justice: the artist as scientist — 12 Comments

  1. I’ve read that, as a lepidopterist, Nabokov was seen as a guy who got absorbed in details and lost sight of the bigger picture. Having read his Lectures on Literature, that comes as no surprise. But I’m pleased to see he had more on the ball than he got credit for.

  2. Take a look in other places that are NOT in the news.

    Albania…

    while we look to a state which is changing so that it can act when its prior rules stopped that..

    we are ignoring a center right state that is being changed to a socialist one.

    And it may turn out that the russian subway bombing was contrived…

    and so much more…
    [like ignoring a man who missed a governor in an assassination attempt and instead stabbed a dean and slashed is throat. of course he shows the arguments on guns is dumb, he is black while Tuscon was white, and he was a left greenish revolutionary… ]

  3. “the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

    author, lepidopterist, synesthete. just a brilliant man.

  4. But…but…the “experts” all agreed he was wrong. So he had to be wrong, yes? The science was settled!

    Nabokov only had one constituency that agreed with him: the data.

  5. Nabokov has always been a mystery to me. There has to be something of genius in a man that can have the reader feeling pity for such despicable characters. We should also remember that the theory of continental drift came from an obscure weatherman, and was greatly ridiculed at the time.

  6. Nabokov was blessed by at least two rare traits especially helpful to a field zoologist: wonderfully sharp vision exciding usual by a factor of 100, and an eidetic memory, that is, ability to remember the whole sensory input as it was, not just some general impression of it, like absolute majority of people. (The latter is often associated with synesthesia, but is not as rare as 100-times sharper vision.) Human geneticists estimated that such vision is associated with a rare genetic mutation which frequency of occurence 1 per million. The two other known persons in history with such mutation were Aristotel and Leonardo. Aristotel described some tiny details of flies wings and antenae which were confirmed by modern zoologists using binocular microscopes with 30 times magnification, but completely obscure for persons with normal vision.
    As for smells of butterflies, these were probably illusions of a synesthesist. Both retinae and visual cortex contain thousand times more neurones and sensory cells in persons with this specific mutation. Is there some neurologic correlate to synesthesia, is still unknown.

  7. Wasn’t there an old show someone dug up last year, featuring a conversation between Lionel Trilling and Nabokov? I’m sure it’s on Youtube somewhere.

    Seeing Trilling try to get at Nabokov’s deep thoughts, and Nabokov coming back with his typical, “What? Sex? Nah, Lolita was just about some dude and some girl” was hilarious. (I absolutely love Trilling, so no disrespect to him – it’s just always awkward when the intellectualizing critic meets the intuitive, introverted artist).

  8. Pingback:Poetic Justice | neo-neocon » Blog Archive » Nabokov and poetic justice: the artist | Hardywise

  9. In this case, it seems a hobbyist was able to overcome the status quo scientific “consensus” of his time.

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