The sevillians Cruz & Ortiz quote Nabokov with obsessive frequency. I have only seen such fervor for the Russian writer in Ángel Díaz, an architect given to reciting whole paragraphs from his works in the dawns of Seville, and in my uncle Manuel Fernández-Galiano, also born in Seville and a professor of classical Greek, who felt for Nabokov a devotion hardly shared with Naipaul or Borges, and to whom I presented, shortly before his death, the lectures of the author of Speak, Memory on Russian literature, strangely unknown to him. Nabokov’s texts on Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Pushkin or Dostoyevsky served as scripts when he was making a living teaching in American universities, until the success of Lolita allowed him to devote all his time to writing, from then on only shared with his passion for Lepidoptera, to the study of which he had devoted himself professionally while working for Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology in the 1940s...
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