In response to:
Lives & Loves of the Exile from the September 24, 2015 issue
In Edward Mendelson’s review of Vincent Giroud’s Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music [NYR, September 24], Mendelson quotes Nabokov writing of himself in Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan (1975): “as Ariel says, my wish was and is ‘to please.’” It is Prospero who says at the end of The Tempest: “Gentle breath of yours my sails/Must fill, or else my project fails,/Which was to please.”
