'From the Caveman to Keats'

No writer’s death during my lifetime has so stunned me, left me unwilling to accept the news, as Vladimir Nabokov’s. On a muggy night in Youngstown, Ohio, while driving around the city, I learned from a radio report that “the controversial author of Lolita” (as newsman around the globe inevitably phrased it) had died in Swiss exile on July 2, 1977, age seventy-eight. No more Invitations to a Beheading, no more Pnins. The Original of Laura was still thirty-two years away and hardly worthy of our anticipation. Nabokov taught us to expect wonder in what we read. Nabokov was never a systematic critic of literature but his influence on my tastes was lasting. Dostoevsky remains “Dusty,” and Freud, more than ever, is the “Viennese quack.” The aim of reading and writing, he taught us, is “aesthetic bliss.” The day after his death I started rereading Ada, waiting for that passage about the shadows cast by leaves. Then I reread the sad, funny, tricky Pnin. Early on, the narrator tells us: “I do…