Vladimir Nabokov: Teasing Trickster

This rite of dotage called Late Style is peculiar to artists of one sort or another. Airline pilots and hepatologists are, thankfully, among the undeservedly excluded. This is an almost exclusively aesthetic matter. What it signifies is, however, moot. As a subject for disputatious inquiry it has been posthumously divvied up between the shades of Theodor Adorno and Edward Said and their packs of enthusiastic yes-persons who may consider that Late Style is as involuntary and inevitable as a grande dame’s wisp of light moustache, or perhaps see it as a critical conceit carried with the full diffidence of British boastfulness.