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"Do you really think that Chekov is Chekov because he wrote about 'social phenomenoa', read - justments of a new industrial middle class, 'kulaks' and 'rising serfs' (which sounds like the seas)? I thought he wrote of the kind of things that gentle King Lear proposed to discuss in prison with his daughters. I also think that at a time when American readers are taught from high school on to seek in books 'general ideas' a critic's duty should be to draw their attention to the specific detail, to the unique image, without which - as you know as well as I do - there can be no art, no genius, no Chekov, no terror, no tenderness, and no surprise."

Nabokov form The Nabokov - Wilson Letters 1979

6.1.79

So we'll live.

And pray and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies, and hear poor rouges talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too - who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out - and take upon's* the mystery of things, as if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out, In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones

91

that ebb and flow by the moon.

*take upon's - undertake to explain

King Lear - Act 5, scene 3

But a man must live. Not for nothing do we invest so much of ourselves in other people's lives - or even in momentary pictures of people we do not know. It cuts both ways: the happy group inside the lighted window, the figure in long grass in the orchard seen from the train stay and support us in our dark hours. Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do. It is the emotion to which we remain faithful, after all: we are taught to recover it in some other place. p95

In the chaos that suddenly thrusts in, nothing remains unreal, except possibly love. Then, love only remains a widened