Winner of a Nobel prize for literature in 1933, poet and writer Bunin tries to engage and befriend Nabokov in Paris in the 1930s but attains only superficial success. In describing his response to Bunin, Nabokov reveals a "morbid dislike for restaurants and cafés" and an aversion to confessional conversation.
See Claude Deprès
Claude Deprès is the nine-year-old girl with whom the ten-year-old Nabokov falls in love while on summer holiday at Biarritz, France, in 1909. As Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd points out in his introduction to the 1999 Everyman's Library edition of Speak, Memory, the image of Claude "prefigures and clearly inspires Lolita," the character in the novel of the same name that made Nabokov a celebrity. Colette is the adult pseudonym of Claude Deprès.
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