Katerina Bodovski

I’m a sociologist of education, not a scholar of literature. And yet, if I need to choose one book, it is The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov. It is difficult to describe the novel or the author in one paragraph. I fell in love with Nabokov about 25 years ago. Here is the intellect of immeasurable magnitude, a literary genius, a translator, a critic, a scientist. He’s made the most esthetically sophisticated jewelry of words, he played with his own creations; he zoomed in and out of his characters and came close but then distanced himself infinitely from his readers. Nabokov had two passions (literature and butterflies); he was fluent in three languages, had a working knowledge of probably half a dozen, he lived in six countries but most importantly he changed both the Russian and the American literature forever. The scholar, the artist, the Master.