Read complete books and articles on: Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov, Vladimir - vlädēˈmĭr näbôˈkŏf, 1899–1977, Russian-American author, b. St. Petersburg, Russia. He emigrated to England after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and graduated from Cambridge in 1922. He moved to the United States in 1940. From 1948 to 1959 he was professor of Russian literature at Cornell Univ. He moved to

One of the great novelists of the 20th cent., Nabokov was an extraordinarily imaginative writer, often experimenting with the form of the novel. Although his works are frequently obscure and puzzling—filled with grotesque incidents, word games, and literary allusions—they are always erudite, witty, and intriguing. Before 1940, Nabokov wrote in Russian under the name V. Sirin. Among his early novels are Mary (1926, tr. 1970) and Invitation to a Beheading (1938, tr. 1959). His first book in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1938).

Nabokov's most widely known work is undoubtedly Lolita (1958). The story of a middle-aged European intellectual's infatuation with a 12-year-old American "nymphet," Lolita was considered scandalous when it was first published. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) is a philosophical novel that is both the chronicle of a long incestuous love affair and a probe into the nature of time. Among Nabokov's other novels are Bend Sinister (1947), Pnin (1957), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974).

Nabokov's volumes of poetry include Poems and Problems (1970). Among collections of his short stories are Nine Stories (1947), Nabokov's Dozen (1958), and A Russian Beauty (1973); many of them are gathered in The Stories of Vladimir Nobokov (1995). Among his other works are a critical study of Gogol (1944); translations from the Russian, notably a four-volume version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964); and several autobiographical volumes, most notably Speak, Memory (1966). His college lectures, posthumously published, include Lectures on Literature: British, French, and German Writers (1980) and Lectures on Russian Literature (1981). He also achieved an international reputation as a lepidopterist.

See biography by B. Boyd (2 vol., 1990–91); studies by A. Field (1967), W. W. Rowe (1971), D. Fowler (1974), L. Toker (1989), and M. Wood (1995); B. Boyd and R. M. Pyle, ed., Nabokov's Butterflies (2000). See also biography of his wife by S. Schiff (1999).

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14 of the Best Books and Articles on: Vladimir Nabokov

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1.

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (literary criticism) » Read Now
by Harold Bloom. 123 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
2.

Lolita Revisited, in New England Review » Read Now
by Michael Wood. 29 pgs.

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...he must appear textually "as an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov talking about his own book." Nabokov was presumably...the author of whatever it is remains unquestioned...
3.

Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism » Read Now
by John Brust Foster Jr.. 260 pgs.

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Despite Vladimir Nabokov's hostility toward literary labels, he clearly recognized his own place in cultural history. In a fresh approach stressing Nabokov's European context, John Foster shows how this writer's art of memory intersects with early twentieth-century modernism. Tracing his interests...
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Despite Vladimir Nabokov's hostility toward literary labels, he clearly recognized his own place in cultural history. In a fresh approach stressing Nabokov's European context, John Foster shows how this writer's art of memory intersects with early twentieth-century modernism. Tracing his interests in temporal perspective and the mnemonic image, in intertextual reminiscences, and in individuality amid cultural multiplicity, the book begins with such early Russian novels as Mary, then treats his emerging art of memory from Laughter in the Dark to The Gift. After discussing the author's cultural repositioning in his first English novels, Foster turns to Nabokov's masterpiece as an artist of memory, the autobiography Speak, Memory, and ends with an epilogue on Pale Fire. As a cross-cultural overview of modernism, this book examines how Nabokov navigated among Proust and Bergson, Freud and Mann, and Joyce and Eliot. It also explores his response to Baudelaire and Nietzsche as theorists of modernity, and his sense of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin as modernist precursors. As an approach to Nabokov, the book reflects the heightened importance of autobiography in current literary study. Other critical issues addressed include Bakhtin's theory of intertextuality, deconstructive views of memory, Benjamin's modernism of memory, and Nabokov's assumptions about modernism as a concept.
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4.

Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov's Prose » Read Now
by David H. J. Larmour. 182 pgs.

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The prose writings of Vladimir Nabokov form one of the most intriguing oeuvres of the twentieth century. His novels, which include Despair, Lolita and Pale Fire , have been celebrated for their stylistic artistry, their formal complexity, and their unique treatment of themes of memory, exile...
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The prose writings of Vladimir Nabokov form one of the most intriguing oeuvres of the twentieth century. His novels, which include Despair, Lolita and Pale Fire , have been celebrated for their stylistic artistry, their formal complexity, and their unique treatment of themes of memory, exile, loss, and desire. This collection of essays offers readings of several novels as well as discussions of Nabokov's exchange of views about literature with Edmund Wilson, and his place in the 1960s and contemporary popular culture. The volume brings together a diverse group of Nabokovian readers, of widely divergent scholarly backgrounds, interests, and approaches. Together they shift the focus from the manipulative games of author and text to the restless and sometimes resistant reader, and suggest new ways of enjoying these endlessly fascinating texts.
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5.

Transcending Exile: Conrad, Nabokov, I.B. Singer » Read Now
by Asher Z. Milbauer. 142 pgs.

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...Poems and Problems by Vladimir Nabokov ; New Directions Publishing...of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov; Farrar, Straus and Giroux...Criticism and interpretation. 4...
6.

The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov & Milan Kundera » Read Now
by Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov, Hana Pichova. 148 pgs.

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In The Art of Memory in Exile, Hana Pichova explores the themes of memory and exile in selected novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera. Both writers, Pichova argues, stress how personal and cultural memory serves as a creative means of overcoming the artist's and exile's loss of homeland. In...
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In The Art of Memory in Exile, Hana Pichova explores the themes of memory and exile in selected novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera. Both writers, Pichova argues, stress how personal and cultural memory serves as a creative means of overcoming the artist's and exile's loss of homeland. In their virtuoso displays of literary talent, Nabokov and Kundera showcase the strategies that allow their protagonists to succeed as emigres: a creative fusing of past and present through the prism of the imagination.
Pichova closely analyzes two novels by each author: the first written in exile (Nabokov's Mary and Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) and a later, pivotal novel in each writer's career (Nabokov's The Gift and Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being). In all four texts, these authors explore how the kaleidoscope of personal and cultural memory confronts a fragmented and untenable present, contrasting the lives of fictional emigres who fail to bridge the gap between past andpresent with those emigres whose rich artistic vision allows them to transcend the trials of homelessness.
By juxtaposing these novels and their authors, Pichova provides a unique perspective on each writer's vast appeal and success. She finds that in the work of Nabokov and Kundera, the most successful exiles express a vision that transcends both national and temporal boundaries.
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7.

Redemption Through Art in Nabokov's Ada, in Critique » Read Now
by Sissela Bok. 11 pgs.

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...curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books." 14 NOTES 1. Vladimir Nabokov, Ada (New York, 1969 ), p. 625. 2. _____, Lolita (New...
8.

Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery » Read Now
by Brian Boyd. 303 pgs.

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Pale Fire is regarded by many as Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece. The novel has been hailed as one of the most striking early examples of postmodernism and has become a famous test case for theories about reading because of the apparent impossibility of deciding between several radically different...
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Pale Fire is regarded by many as Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece. The novel has been hailed as one of the most striking early examples of postmodernism and has become a famous test case for theories about reading because of the apparent impossibility of deciding between several radically different interpretations. Does the book have two narrators, as it first appears, or one? How much is fantasy and how much is reality? Whose fantasy and whose reality are they? Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer and hitherto the foremost proponent of the idea that Pale Fire has one narrator, John Shade, now rejects this position and presents a new and startlingly different solution that will permanently shift the nature of critical debate on the novel. Boyd argues that the book does indeed have two narrators, Shade and Charles Kinbote, but reveals that Kinbote had some strange and highly surprising help in writing his sections. In light of this interpretation, Pale Fire now looks distinctly less postmodern--and more interesting than ever. In presenting his arguments, Boyd shows how Nabokov designed Pale Fire for readers to make surprising discoveries on a first reading and even more surprising discoveries on subsequent readings by following carefully prepared clues within the novel. Boyd leads the reader step-by-step through the book, gradually revealing the profound relationship between Nabokov's ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics. If Nabokov has generously planned the novel to be accessible on a first reading and yet to incorporate successive vistas of surprise, Boyd argues, it is because he thinks a deep generosity lies behind the inexhaustibility, complexity, and mystery of the world. Boyd also shows how Nabokov's interest in discovery springs in part from his work as a scientist and scholar, and draws comparisons between the processes of readerly and scientific discovery. This is a profound, provocative, and compelling reinterpretation of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
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9.

The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon (Chap. V "Nabokov's Imitations of Morality") » Read Now
by Brian Stonehill. 222 pgs.

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...our own day. In the works of Vladimir Nabokov, William...at how this can be so. In Vladimir Nabokov novel King, Queen, Knave...is an image of the author, Vladimir Nabokov...
10.

Literature and Domination: Sex, Knowledge, and Power in Modern Fiction (Chap. 3 "Adorno, Althusser, and Humbert Humbert: Nabokov's Lolita as Neo-Marxist Critique of Bourgeois Subjectivity") » Read Now
by M. Keith Booker. 188 pgs.

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Employing thc theoretical resources provided by cultural critics such as Adorno, Jameson, Althusser, and Foucault, M. Keith Booker examines the treatment of issues of power and domination in modern literature. Discussing texts such as Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Thomas...
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Employing thc theoretical resources provided by cultural critics such as Adorno, Jameson, Althusser, and Foucault, M. Keith Booker examines the treatment of issues of power and domination in modern literature. Discussing texts such as Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Thomas Pynchon's V., and Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, Booker focuses on gender relations as a locus of struggles for power in human relations generally. He also pays special attention to the work of Samuel Beckett, reading the novels Watt and The Lost Ones to explore the issues of power and domination in an Irish cultural context. For all of the texts read, such issues are explored in terms not only of content but of style and form. What is distinctive about many modern texts, Booker claims, is the reflexive way literary meditations on power, authority, and domination turn inward to involve examinations of textuality and reading as images of the kinds of struggles for mastery that inform society at large. Booker suggests that literary knowledge is of a different order than the traditional theoretical knowledge that is equated with power in the West. "Literature has the potential to explore and illuminate objects of inquiry in a mode of dialogue and performance rather than by seeking to dominate them in the traditional mode of science", he writes. "Especially in the difficult and complex texts of modern literature, successful reading requires that readers and texts work together, pointing toward ways the human drive for mastery can be fulfilled through cooperation rather than through demanding the submission of some Other who is being mastered or dominated".
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11.

Important Nonsense ("Hiding Nabokov" begins on p. 229) » Read Now
by Lionel Abel. 244 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Literature, Entire Library

"A self-help book as well as a manual for erotic pleasure enhancement."-Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic
12.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight » Read Now
by Vladimir Nabokov. 208 pgs.

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...OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT ALSO BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV Available from New Directions...LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT VLADIMIR NABOKOV NEW DIRECTIONS Copyright...INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION...
13.

Laughter in the Dark » Read Now
by Vladimir Nabokov. 292 pgs.

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...-1- LAUGHTER IN THE DARK BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK COPYRIGHT, 1938 BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV NEW EDITION, 1960 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 60-16644...
14.

Reference Guide to Russian Literature » Read Now
by Nicole Christian, Neil Cornwell. 972 pgs.

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Reference Guide to Russian Literature includes entries on more than 250 Russian writers and some 300 important works of Russian literature.
The Reference Guide to Russian Literature is introduced by survey articles, written by scholars in the field, that put the writers and works entries into the...
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Reference Guide to Russian Literature includes entries on more than 250 Russian writers and some 300 important works of Russian literature.
The Reference Guide to Russian Literature is introduced by survey articles, written by scholars in the field, that put the writers and works entries into the contexts of history and genre. Appendices include a general bibliography of anthologies and critical studies of Russian literature, followed by a Title Index.
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