VLADIMIR NABOKOV
39
hothouses of dishonest or conscientious translations. No wonder the
good knight thrived and bred through the world, and at last was
equally at home everywhere: as a carnival figure at a festival in
Bolivia and as the abstract symbol of noble but spineless political
aspirations in old Russia.
We are confronted by an interesting phenomenon: a literary
hero losing gradually contact with the book that bore him; leaving
his fatherland, leaving his creator's desk and roaming space after
roaming Spain. In result, Don Quixote is greater today than he was
in Cervantes's womb. He has ridden for three hundred and fifty
years through the jungles and tundras of human thought-and he
has gained in vitality and stature. We do not laugh at him any
longer. His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for every–
thing that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The par–
ody has become a paragon.
,'A fine piece of
intellectual history ....
It
makes available an
important and complex
body of literature."
-Mark Poster
Marxism and
Modernism
An Historical Study
of Lukacs, Brecht,
Benjamin , and Adorno
Eugene
Lunn
$29.95
at
bookstores or from
University of
California Press
Berkeley 94720
