Showing results by author "Vladimir Nabokov" in Comedy & Humour

As intricate as a house of mirrors, Nabokov’s last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899), whose life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, though the two are not to be confused (?).

This novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing emporium. Ruddy, self-satisfied, and thoroughly masculine, he is perfectly repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead, the thin, awkward, myopic Franz. Newly arrived in Berlin, Franz soon repays his uncle’s condescension in his aunt’s bed.

The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom.

"...bir öyküyü Rusça okurken duyduğum heyecanı, sürükleyiciliği, Rus insanının Anadolu insanına tıpatıp benzeyen 'kara mizah' yönünü Türkçe çeviriye olduğu gibi taşımaya çalıştım. Bu çevirilerin hiç birine fazla renk katılmamış, içinden renk alınmamıştır. İyi dinlemeler..."