History of The Manuscript
Nabokov showed it to just a few people, and then lost the manuscript in the process of coming to America and believed that he had destroyed it. However, he recovered it later in Ithaca in 1959, at a time he had already published "Lolita". He reread The Enchanter, and termed it “precise and lucid”, but left it alone suggesting that eventually "the Nabokovs" could translate it. Dmitri Nabokov judged it to be an important and mature work of his father and translated and published it posthumously. The published work also contains two author’s notes (comments by VN about The Enchanter), and a postscript essay by DN titled On a Book Entitled the Enchanter.
Read more about this topic: The Enchanter
Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history of, history and/or manuscript:
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (18881959)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“This nightmare occupied some ten pages of manuscript and wound off with a sermon so destructive of all hope to non-Presbyterians that it took the first prize. This composition was considered to be the very finest effort of the evening.... It may be remarked, in passing, that the number of compositions in which the word beauteous was over-fondled, and human experience referred to as lifes page, was up to the usual average.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910)