The Jetsam - Lara Biyuts (best adventure books to read .TXT) 📗

harsh treatment. Meanwhile, Hermann had also been arrested, but he was sent to fight on the front lines in Africa, and he would survive. According to camp records, Sergei had died on Jan. 9, 1945, of a combination of dysentery, starvation and exhaustion. Neuengamme was liberated four months later.

Meanwhile in America, VN was beginning a new life. He spent the summer of 1944 sunning himself in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, with Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy; he collected butterflies for Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, enjoyed the benefits of American dentistry and taught Russian to Wellesley College undergraduates, with whom he flirted shamelessly. The New Yorker was beginning to print his poems. He knew nothing of what was happening to his brother in Europe. In autumn of 1945, he had a night dream of his brother Sergei. He saw him lying on a bunk in a German concentration camp, in terrible pain. The next day he received a letter from a family member in Prague about the death of Sergei.

After the war, Hermann Thieme spent his later life at Schloss Weissenstein, without a career, caring for his invalid sister. He died in 1972.

To bring to a conclusion, let’s return to VN’s novels. In all of them we can see a certain fundamental layer: a clash between a lonely individual -- who has a mental singularity and a certain sublime gift -- and the crowd, the narrow-minded persons as well as the rough and boring world. No defense from the clash, and the lonely individual dies. The conflict we can see in The Defense, in Invitation to a Beheading as well as in Lolita, where the main character has a gift that is not correspondent to the generally accepted morals, a gift of original erotic vision. VN hates the crowd; he despises the generally accepted morals -- like Oscar Wilde. The profound relation of VN’s mental experiences and his brother’s mentality as well as gay writers’ creativeness emerges in this case. A lot of gay writers prefer a lonely individual as a main character, who has a singularity and erotic gift, and they describe the conflict of the character and the alien surrounding that repels the lonely individual and his gift. VN’s main characters have other “gift”, but the conflict is the same. This similarity is based upon the family relation of the Nabokovs, whose education gave rise to contempt and hatred to the crowd, giving rise to the aristocratic individualism that was revealed both in creative works and in erotic tastes, and only by virtue of a subtle play of genes, the phenomenon of VN came into the world in one case, and in other case we can see his shade, where his uncles and brother were covered up. As the uncles and brother are coming out of the shade, we can see in the new light VN, his creative works, and his world, so penetrated with sense of loneliness, so strained and always tragic.

 

2007

 

Discover other titles by Lara Biyuts at Smashwords.com:

 

Clair-Obscur. Part 1, 2

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/541304

 

Clair-Obscur. Part 3

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/541307

 

Forever Jocelyn (novel)

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/30041

 

La Arme Blanche (novel)

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/30042

 

Silver Thread Spinner (novel)

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/110216

 

A Handful of Blossoms (novelette)

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/168036

 

Vampire Armastus

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/31439

 

Extraordinary Story of a Turnskin

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/259119

 

Playing White

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/264429

 

Latent Prints

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/451734

 

Infernal Kaleidoscope

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/436815

 

Beyond the Silver Threads

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/262541

 

Lord Jocelyn

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/284860

 

Severin

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/306873

 

Eric’s Wonderful Quest

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/595873

 

Italian Imbroglios

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/429252

 

The Dead that Travel Fast

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/433390

 

Billiard at Dawn

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/448225

 

Through the Baltic Looking-Glass

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/505270

 

Crepuscular Rays

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/538323

 

Eric’s Wonderful Quest

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/595873

 

Wild Polka Dot

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/603480

 

Vampire in the Mirror

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/598508

 

The Jetsam (essays)

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/27895

 

The Dome (essays)

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/174846

 

The Sunless Parlour (essays)

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/30327

 

Icebound Minstrel (poems)

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/27811

 

Ball-Masquerade (poems)

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/27812

 

Connect with Me Online: larisabee@yahoo.com

 

Twitter: http://twitter.com/deajuly

 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bijucie.lara

 

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/lasept

 

My blog: http://revueblanche.blogspot.com/

 

A short bio:

Lara Biyuts (aka Lara Biuts, Larisa Biyuts) is a Smashwords author of 14 books of fiction, writer of the RevueBlanche.blogspot, collage maker for her book covers, translator, who signs her translations as Larisa Biyuts. Her novella A Handful of Blossoms is 2012 Rainbow Awards Honorable Mention. Her works are accepted for anthologies: Cat’s Cradle Time Yarns (Time Yarns Anthologies), Authors off the Shelf (Lazy Beagle Entertainment), Of Words and Water 2014 (Words and Water group supporting WaterAid), Hope Springs a Turtle, The Black Rose of Winter, and Greek Fire (Lost Tower Publications). Her old tale and poems are featured on TheHolidayCafe.com (2013). Her poetry is on the monthly eJournal The Criterion (April, 2014). She is a Goodreads librarian.

Her novel La Lune Blanche is the first of the series. “The novel is the world where pleasures of life and pleasures of art are just norms.” (Turner Maxwell Books)

“The author produces a setting which is detailed and believable, and also characters which the reader gets to know well. Also the plot moves along nicely through-out the story.” (April O., facebook.com)

“Lara Biyuts’ writing is deep and multi layered.” (Maggie Mack Books, maggiemackbooks.com)

“Lara Biyuts comes to us from the great tradition of Nabokov and Conrad, enriching our literature in English with the rich cosmopolitain perspecitve of the East European tradition leading back to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Like those great masters she takes us also into the shadow world of sexuality with its hidden psychology, possession and sensual revelations.” (Robert Sheppard, Author of the novel Spiritus Mundi, linkedin.com)

“The secret of Lara Biyuts is her tales. The secret of her tales is their charm. The secret of the charm is Lara Biyuts.” (Les Hudson, goodreads.com)

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Publication Date: 06-12-2009

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