"I don't give a damn for the group. The community, the masses, and so forth ... there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art."-Vladimir Nabokov, 1964.

Nabokov's insistence on art as pure artifice, that it be devoid of all social, political and even philosophical content, guides one to most of the world's great writing. He makes us forever wary of the book that could be "explained" in a few choice sentences. Where there is no ambiguity, asserts Nabokov, there is no art.