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And that conjunction, I want to suggest,
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that conjunction has to do with the traumatic event of having had to emigrate,
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having had to take up another language.
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Nabokov will say that his private tragedy is that, let's see:
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[His] private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not,
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be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom,
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my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue
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for a second-rate brand of English devoid of any of those apparatuses--
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the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop,
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the implied associations and traditions--
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which the native illusionist, the frac-tails flying,
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can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.