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…