Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something, it is that something itself.
Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce, 1929 (p.14) --- On Joyce’s Finnegans Wake:
The forms of zest are innumerable. Sherlock Holmes, it may be remembered, picked up a hat which he happened to find lying in the street. After looking at it for a moment he remarked that its owner had come down in the world as the result of drink and that his wife was no longer so fond of him as she used to be.
Life could never be boring to a man to whom casual objects offered such a wealth of interest. Think of the different things that may be noticed in the course of a country walk. One man may be interested in the birds, another in the vegetation, another in the geology, another in the agriculture, and so on. Any one of these things is interesting if it interests you, and, other things being equal, the man who is interested in any one of them is better adapted to the world than the man who is not interested.
-- Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, p. 95
その遺言とは、ナボコフの「遺作」についてのもの。彼が死の間際まで書き綴っていた未完の小説『The Original of Laura(ローラの原型)』の原稿は、スイスの銀行の貸し金庫に30年ほど保存されてきた。しかし、そもそもこの原稿についてナボコフは、相続人である妻ヴェラに、死後すぐに破棄するように明確に指示していたという。結局その遺言を実行できないまま、ヴェラが91年に亡くなってしまったため、遺言の実行は彼の息子ドミトリ(73)に委ねられることになった。
