Vladimir Nabokov died on this day in 1977

“A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

+ “The Art of Translation” BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV: “Mr. Nabokov is in the habit of introducing any job of this kind which he undertakes by an announcement that he is unique and incomparable,” Wilson wrote in a 1965 review of Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin, “and that everybody else who has attempted it is an oaf and an ignoramus.”

“Véra has blue eyes and a birdlike profile. Her hair is completely white. They are soon to celebrate a wedding anniversary, “our golden,” Nabokov says. They met in Berlin and married there in 1925, but they might as easily have met in Leningrad. “We went to the same dancing class, didn’t we?” he asks. It has not been an unhappy marriage then? “That is the understatement of the century,” Nabokov smiles.”

+ An Old Magician Named Nabokov Writes and Lives in Splendid Exile by James Salter