“He, to whom so called politics (that ridiculous sequence of pacts, conflicts, aggravations, frictions, discords, collapses and the transformation of perfectly innocent little towns into the names of international treaties) meant nothing, would sometimes immerse himself into the vast bowels of Vasilev and live for an instant actuated by his, Vasilev’s inner mechanism where next to the “Locarno” button there was one for “Lockout” and where a pseudo-clever, pseudo entertaining game was conducted by such ill-hatched symbols as “the Five Kremlin Leaders” or “The Kurd Rebellion” or individual surnames that had lost all human connotations: Hindenburg, Marx, Painlevé, Herriot….. this was a world of prophetic utterances, presentiments, mysterious combinations; a world that was a hundredfold more spectral than the most abstract dream.”
Vladimir Nabokov, “The Gift”, 1962.
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