Download or read book Nabokov in America written by Robert Roper and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique portrait of Vladimir Nabokov told through the lens of the years he spent in a land that enchanted him, America. The author of the immortal Lolita and Pale Fire, born to an eminent Russian family, conjures the apotheosis of the high modernist artist: cultured, refined-as European as they come. But Vladimir Nabokov, who came to America fleeing the Nazis, came to think of his time here as the richest of his life. Indeed, Nabokov was not only happiest here, but his best work flowed from his response to this exotic land. Robert Roper fills out this period in the writer's life with charm and insight- covering Nabokov's critical friendship with Edmund Wilson, his time at Cornell, his role at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. But Nabokov in America finds its narrative heart in his serial sojourns into the wilds of the West, undertaken with his wife, Vera, and their son over more than a decade. Nabokov covered more than 200,000 miles as he indulged his other passion: butterfly collecting. Roper has mined fresh sources to bring detail to these journeys, and traces their significant influence in Nabokov's work: on two-lane highways and in late-'40s motels and cafés, we feel Lolita draw near, and understand Nabokov's seductive familiarity with the American mundane. Nabokov in America is also a love letter to U.S. literature, in Nabokov's broad embrace of it from Melville to the Beats. Reading Roper, we feel anew the mountain breezes and the miles logged, the rich learning and the Romantic mind behind some of Nabokov's most beloved books.
Download or read book Strong Opinions written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1990-03-17 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strong Opinions offers Nabokov's trenchant, witty, and always engaging views on everything from the Russian Revolution to the correct pronunciation of Lolita. • "First published in 1973, this collection of interviews and essays offers an intriguing insight into one of the most brilliant authors of the 20th century." - The Guardian Nabokov ranges over his life, art, education, politics, literature, movies, among other subjects. Keen to dismiss those who fail to understand his work and happy to butcher those sacred cows of the literary canon he dislikes, Nabokov is much too entertaining to be infuriating, and these interviews, letters and articles are as engaging, challenging and caustic as anything he ever wrote.
Download or read book Insomniac Dreams written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First publication of an index-card diary in which Nabokov recorded sixty-four dreams and subsequent daytime episodes, allowing the reader a glimpse of his innermost life.
Download or read book Ada or Ardor A Family Chronicle written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by ببلومانيا للنشر والتوزيع. This book was released on 2024-02-17 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. But more: it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the superb work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.
Download or read book Pale Fire written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by ببلومانيا للنشر والتوزيع. This book was released on 2024-02-18 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should be. Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.
Download or read book Vladimir Nabokov in Context written by David Bethea and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vladimir Nabokov, bilingual writer of dazzling masterpieces, is a phenomenon that both resists and requires contextualization. This book challenges the myth of Nabokov as a sole genius who worked in isolation from his surroundings, as it seeks to anchor his work firmly within the historical, cultural, intellectual and political contexts of the turbulent twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov in Context maps the ever-changing sites, people, cultures and ideologies of his itinerant life which shaped the production and reception of his work. Concise and lively essays by leading scholars reveal a complex relationship of mutual influence between Nabokov's work and his environment. Appealing to a wide community of literary scholars this timely companion to Nabokov's writing offers new insights and approaches to one of the most important, and yet most elusive writers of modern literature.
Download or read book Selected Letters 1940 1977 written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by HMH. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 627 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Wonderful, compulsively readable, delicious” personal correspondences, spanning decades in the life and literary career of the author of Lolita (The Washington Post Book World). An icon of twentieth-century literature, Vladimir Nabokov was a novelist, poet, and playwright, whose personal life was a fascinating story in itself. This collection of more than four hundred letters chronicles the author’s career, recording his struggles in the publishing world, the battles over Lolita, and his relationship with his wife, among other subjects, and gives a surprising look at the personality behind the creator of such classics as Pale Fire and Pnin. “Dip in anywhere, and delight follows.” —John Updike
Download or read book Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts written by Dana Dragunoiu and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2022 Brian Boyd Prize for Best Second Book on Nabokov This book shows how ethics and aesthetics interact in the works of one of the most celebrated literary stylists of the twentieth century: the Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Dana Dragunoiu reads Nabokov’s fictional worlds as battlegrounds between an autonomous will and heteronomous passions, demonstrating Nabokov’s insistence that genuinely moral acts occur when the will triumphs over the passions by answering the call of duty. Dragunoiu puts Nabokov’s novels into dialogue with the work of writers such as Alexander Pushkin, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, and Marcel Proust; with Kantian moral philosophy; with the institution of the modern duel of honor; and with the European traditions of chivalric literature that Nabokov studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge University. This configuration of literary influences and philosophical contexts allows Dragunoiu to advance an original and provocative argument about the formation, career, and legacies of an author who viewed moral activity as an art, and for whom artistic and moral acts served as testaments to the freedom of the will.
Download or read book Nabokov written by Leona Toker and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vladimir Nabokov described the literature course he taught at Cornell as "a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures." Leona Toker here pursues a similar investigation of the enigmatic structures of Nabokov's own fiction. According to Toker, most previous critics stressed either Nabokov’s concern with form or the humanistic side of his works, but rarely if ever the two together. In sensitive and revealing readings of ten novels, Toker demonstrates that the need to reconcile the human element with aesthetic or metaphysical pursuits is a constant theme of Nabokov’s and that the tension between technique and content is itself a key to his fiction. Written with verve and precision, Toker’s book begins with Pnin and follows the circular pattern that is one of her subject’s own favored devices.
Download or read book Stalking Nabokov written by Brian Boyd and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-25 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Brian Boyd surveys Vladimir Nabokov's life, career, and legacy; his art, science, and thought; his subtle humor and puzzle-like storytelling; his complex psychological portraits; and his inheritance from, reworking of, and affinities with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Machado de Assis. Boyd also offers new ways of reading Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada or Ardor, and the unparalleled autobiography, Speak, Memory, disclosing otherwise unknown information about the author's world. Sharing his personal reflections as he recounts the adventures, hardships, and revelations of researching Nabokov's life? oeuvre?, he cautions against using Nabokov's metaphysics as the key to unlocking all of the enigmatic author's secrets. Assessing and appreciating Nabokov as novelist, memoirist, poet, translator, scientist, and individual, Boyd helps us understand more than ever Nabokov's multifaceted genius.
Download or read book Nabokov s Butterflies written by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 820 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Literature and Lepidoptera dance an elaborate pas de deux through seventy years of Vladimir Nabokov's life, from his boyhood in Russia to his life as an emigre in the Crimea, Berlin, France, the United States, and finally in Switzerland. An American literary giant, Nabokov also produced first-rate work as a scientist, and in his fiction and elsewhere eloquently advocated attention to the details of the natural world and promoted the delights of discovery." "Nabokov's Butterflies presents Nabokov's twin passions through an astonishingly rich array of novel selections, stories, poems, screenplay, autobiography, criticism, lecturers, articles, reviews, interviews, letters, and notes, plus a wealth of beautiful and fanciful drawings by Nabokov and photographs of him in the field."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Matters of Fact in Jane Austen written by Janine Barchas and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-08-20 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity, Janine Barchas makes the bold assertion that Jane Austen’s novels allude to actual high-profile politicians and contemporary celebrities as well as to famous historical figures and landed estates. Barchas is the first scholar to conduct extensive research into the names and locations in Austen’s fiction by taking full advantage of the explosion of archival materials now available online. According to Barchas, Austen plays confidently with the tension between truth and invention that characterizes the realist novel. Of course, the argument that Austen deployed famous names presupposes an active celebrity culture during the Regency, a phenomenon recently accepted by scholars. The names Austen plucks from history for her protagonists (Dashwood, Wentworth, Woodhouse, Tilney, Fitzwilliam, and many more) were immensely famous in her day. She seems to bank upon this familiarity for interpretive effect, often upending associations with comic intent. Barchas re-situates Austen’s work closer to the historical novels of her contemporary Sir Walter Scott and away from the domestic and biographical perspectives that until recently have dominated Austen studies. This forward-thinking and revealing investigation offers scholars and ardent fans of Jane Austen a wealth of historical facts, while shedding an interpretive light on a new aspect of the beloved writer's work. -- Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater and English, Yale University, and author of It
Download or read book Nabokov at Cornell written by Gavriel Shapiro and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book Nabokov History and the Texture of Time written by Will Norman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the apparent evasion of history in Vladimir Nabokov's fiction conceals a profound engagement with social, and therefore political, temporalities. While Nabokov scholarship has long assumed the same position as Nabokov himself -- that his works exist in a state of historical exceptionalism -- this study restores the content, context, and commentary to Nabokovian time by reading his American work alongside the violent upheavals of twentieth-century ideological conflicts in Europe and the United States. This approach explores how the author's characteristic temporal manipulations and distortions function as a defensive dialectic against history, an attempt to salvage fiction for autonomous aesthetics. Tracing Nabokov's understanding of the relationship between history and aesthetics from nineteenth-century Russia through European modernism to the postwar American academy, the book offers detailed contextualized readings of Nabokov's major writings, exploring the tensions, fissures, and failures in Nabokov's attempts to assert aesthetic control over historical time. In reading his response to the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and Cold War, Norman redresses the commonly-expressed admiration for Nabokov's heroic resistance to history by suggesting the ethical, aesthetic, and political costs of reading and writing in its denial. This book offers a rethinking of Nabokov's location in literary history, the ideological impulses which inform his fiction, and the importance of temporal aesthetics in negotiating the matrices of modernism.
Download or read book Think Write Speak written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich compilation of the previously uncollected Russian and English prose and interviews of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers, edited by Nabokov experts Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy. “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child": so Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote in the introduction to his volume of selected prose, Strong Opinions. Think, Write, Speak follows up where that volume left off, with a rich compilation of his uncollected prose and interviews, from a 1921 essay about Cambridge to two final interviews in 1977. The chronological order allows us to watch the Cambridge student and the fledgling Berlin reviewer and poet turn into the acclaimed Paris émigré novelist whose stature brought him to teach in America, where his international success exploded with Lolita and propelled him back to Europe. Whether his subject is Proust or Pushkin, the sport of boxing or the privileges of democracy, Nabokov’s supreme individuality, his keen wit, and his alertness to the details of life illuminate the page.
Download or read book Fine Lines written by Stephen Hardwick Blackwell and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reproduces 154 of Russian-American novelist and entomologist Vladimir Nabokov's drawings, few of which have ever been seen in public, and presents essays by ten leading scientists and Nabokov scholars. The contributors underscore the significance of Nabokov's drawings as scientific documents, evaluate his visionary contributions to evolutionary biology and systematics, and offer insights into his unique artistic perception and creativity. Showcasing color drawings of butterflies' distinctive markings and anatomy as well, all as part of his work at the American Museum of Natural History and Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Download or read book Bend Sinister written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1990-04-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man. In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, the government attempts to co-opt Krug's support in order to validate the new regime.
