Part IV: CULTURAL CONTACTS: Chapter 8: NABOKOV AND THE SIXTIES.

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977; Lolita (Book : Nabokov); Pale Fire (Book : Nabokov); Nineteen sixties; Postmodernism (Philosophy)

This chapter traces the impact of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Pale Fire upon the cultural world of the 1960s in the U.S. It also attempts to place Nabokov among his mainstream, Beat, and postmodernist coevals, and speculates on the writer's reaction to the political and social changes which marked this decade. Nabokov's name was everywhere in the sixties and became associated with the liberation of the arts from censorship, yet, as the author points out, Nabokov was an absent presence, a king across the water in Montreux. For the author, Nabokov is also already absent from those literary trends, particularly postmodernism, on which he nevertheless left an indelible imprint. Nabokov loomed over the literary sixties in a way that no other U.S. author has ever dominated a decade. This came about through a set of fortuitous circumstances. Nabokov had made literary history in the sixties, but he was also a part of literary history. This chapter examines Nabokov's role on the U.S. literary scene and its impact on him. It concludes that Nabokov's prestige on the U.S. literary scene in the sixties was such that one would have expected his work to serve as a springboard for a generation of young writers. Yet, according to the author, Nabokov is destined to remain a standard of excellence and comparison, but not of emulation.