Strong opinions

6 TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW STATESMAN

Pushkin and Byron

published November 17, 1967

Sir,

Mr. Pritchett (NS, 27 Oct.) says he would have liked Mr. Magarshack to tell him in what language Pushkin read Byron and other English authors. I do not know Mr. Magarshack's work or works, but I do know that since neither he, nor anybody else, could answer Mr. Pritchett without dipping into me, a vicious spiral is formed with an additional coy little coil supplied by Mr. Prichett's alluding to the «diverting» article I published in Encounter (Feb. 1966). If, however, your reviewer would care to combine the diverting with the instructive I suggest he consult the pages (enumerated in the index to my work on Eugene Onegin under Pushkiniana, English) wherein 1 explain, quite clearly, that most Russians of Pushkin's time, including Pushkin himself, read English authors in French versions.

By a pleasing coincidence the same issue of your journal contains another item worth straightening out. Mr. Desmond MacNamara, writing on a New Zealand novel, thinks that there should be coined a male equivalent of «nymphet» in the sense I gave it. He is welcome to my «faunlet», first mentioned in 1955 (Lolita, Chapter 5). How time flies! How attention flags!