pp. 242-
- the art and/or artifice of the biographer
- 1940s wartime and after / modernism primarily between the wars / moral uncertainty in the British and American wartime novel
- other postwar satirists: Orwell, Lowry, Burgess, Spark, Waugh - in Britain
- Burroughs, Bellow, and Salinger in the US
- literary seriousness of modernism and postwar bourgeois-consumerist culture come together in the literary "performer" - e.g. Book of the Month Club, lost elitism
- tradition of the visiting European writer giving tours - e.g. Dickens
- VN's literary influences / allies: Sterne, Joyce, Flaubert, Proust, Kafka
- VN is the "stranger" living a second life like the characters of his novels
- 252: when "gamesmanship" goes wrong
- persistent theme of totalitarianism and control
- 256-257: style of Speak, Memory and the elusiveness of Nabokov
pp. 258-
- importance of periodicals
- critics/writers mentioned: John Crowe Ransom; Mary McCarthy; Ramon Jakobson, Edmund Wilson, Diana Trilling
- New Critics and formalism
- New York Intellectuals - Trotskyists: art vs. politics
- New York Intellectuals (Trilling, McCarthy etc.) vs. popular front (liberalism vs. revolutionary left)
- McCarthyism + '60s student rebellion
- Edmund Wilson - frienship and relationship with critics, political differences p. 263
- 260: movement away from New Directions toward New Yorker (264-265) literary establishment
pp. 267-
- Nabokov and translation, philosophy, Pushkin
- 269: driving Mr. Nabokov
- the performative - theatrical professor
- 274: "affable severity" - suspected students of cheating
- VN in class (275)
- Kafka's "Metamorphosis"; butterflies 282-283
- 278: mysterious dislike of Dostoevsky (but like Rabelais)
- tennis
- trips to Colorado and Utah
- 286-287 - two linguistic dreams
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