https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/14/nabokov-steinberg-and-me https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/14/nabokov-steinb... America construes itself

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/14/nabokov-steinberg-and-me https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/14/nabokov-steinb... America construes itself as a game that anybody can play, and Russians know how to play it well, as we learn and relearn. In “Lolita,” Nabokov gave us a copy of ourselves we couldn’t tell from the original. No American writer has done the reverse—has written a novel about Russia that understood the country so profoundly, and that Russians themselves read widely and loved. “Lolita” is an American book in a way that no novel by a native-born American is a Russian book. It’s an American masterpiece of the atrocious-hilarious, like “Huckleberry Finn.” We encounter these works as best we can, and fail to civilize them, and pass by in our generations, and they remain.