Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry-English, Russian and French-than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several-Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke-have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned.
( Vladimir Nabokov )
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