Re: Vladimir Nabokov born (22-4-1899)

interesting that VN was born on 4-22 and Conan Doyle was born on 5-22. (and Joyce on 2-2)

 .......... an exchange between him and the critic Edmund Wilson that I read long ago, in which Nabokov amusingly shows up the irreducible subjectivity of people's judgments about the "character" or "quality" of different languages. <<<

                       ----- do you remember Anything else?    (about what he said?)
         --------------- is this in a letter by VN ?                 i have the (paper) book of Nabokov-Wilson letters.  (i'll look into it.)
                         “Nabokov wrote about the difficulties of rebirth in his letters as about agony”, - the writer Viktor Yerofeev notes in the preface to the first of four volumes of the collected works published in the homeland in the Soviet Union.    "He experienced an almost physiological torment, parting with his flexible native language”.             Vladimir Nabokov, who lived on this occasion, said: “I am an American writer, born in Russia, educated in England, where I studied French literature before moving to Germany for fifteen years. ...My head speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear speaks French”.                                ------------- He actually spoke German very well -- he read Freud in German.