Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Vladimir Nabokov

  • Mysterious muse

    Juliet HubbellLittleton, Colorado, United States Few muses are both beautiful and dead, but one such modern muse is L’inconnue de la Seine, a young woman whose drowned corpse so inspired the Parisian morgue personnel who received her body in 1902 that a death mask or masque mortuaire was made of her serenely smiling face. In…

  • Nabokov’s first masterpiece

    Nicholas KangAuckland, New Zealand Gradually the lights disappeared, the phantoms grew sparser, and a wave of oppressive blackness washed over him. The Defense, a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, describes the mental breakdown and ultimate suicide of its fictional protagonist Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin. It is a remarkable literary rendering of what might be termed the process…

  • A twice-told tale: Nabokov and Moore on mental illness and parents’ suffering

    Carol LevineNew York, New York, United States Mental illness casts a wide net, enmeshing patient, family, and doctors. When the patient is young, the main characters are usually parents, who struggle with love, guilt, fear, and despair. Yet families are often secondary, sometimes shadowy, characters in clinical accounts. Fiction allows parents to be the primary…