Lolita Hardcover – 1956

I bought this in a second hand bookstore a couple of years ago and was initially put off as it consisted of transcripts of interviews and letters to newspapers and magazines and looked like nothing more than a gigantic ego trip. However, I started reading parts of it recently and found it more interesting than I had expected.English was not Nabokov's native tongue and, although he had great command of the language, his writing has always had a stilted style as though propped up by an array of dictionaries and thesaurus.At times this makes for great writing – in parts of “Lolita”, for example – and, at others, comes over as showing off or pedantry. Anthony Burgess was a similar show off and loved to shove foreign phrases as well as obscure and invented words in the reader's face.If you like Nabokov you will know what to expect and probably enjoy this collection which is filled with insights into his political and literary views.It was intriguing to note that as far back as 1967 Nabokov foresaw modern political correctness in a Russian term “poshlust”. How is this for an example: “Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Vietnam is seditious ‘poshlust’”?