Friday, March 9, 2012

Nabokov Wrote from 9 A.M. to 2 A.M. (i.e., 17 Hours/Day)

Nabokov's Notes in Onegin

We're proud to say that we had enough discipline to work on Katie for over 10 hours a day during the summer of 2010, which was prompted by examples of amazing feats of discipline that we read about in Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi, but we were further amazed when we read the following quote on The Paris Review's website from Vladimir Nabokov:

"For two months in Cambridge I did nothing (from 9A.M. to 2 A.M.) but work on my commentaries to EO [Eugene Onegin]."

That comes to 17 hours per day! That pales in comparison to our measly 10 hours per day.