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he advised, 'the divine details'! Generalizations and general ideas were anathema to him - because, as he wrote... the word "cosmic" is always in danger of losing its s.' p4

Peter Quennell - Vladamir Nabakov - A Tribute - 1980

...When dealing with a work of art we must always bear in mind that art is a divine game. These two elements - the elements of the divine and that of the game - are equally important. It is divine because this is the element in which man comes nearest to God through becoming a true creator in his own right. And it is a game because it remains art only as long as we are allowed to remember that. After all, it is all make believe, that the people on the stage, for instance, are not actually murdered - in other words,

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only as long as our feelings of horror or of disgust do not obscure our realization that we are, as readers or as spectators, participating in an elaborate and enchanting game: the moment this balance is upset we get, on the stage, ridiculous melodrama, and in a book just a livid description of, say, a case of murder which belongs in a newspaper instead. And we cease to derive that feeling of pleasure and satisfaction and spiritual vibration, that combined feeling which is our true reaction to true art.

V. Nabakov from Lectures in Russian Literature

Not all our aspirations are heroic, and we should

not despise those shabby comforts that

sometimes lead to threadbare joy.

In most bits (the burlesque comic) is represented as a child of nature, the slave of stimulus