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.

This volume comprises an interview with Nabokov as well as nine critical essays that follow a progression focusing first on textual and thematic features of 'Lolita' and then proceeding to broader issues and cultural implications, including the novel's relations to other work of literature and art.

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.

Using Vladimir Nabokov and Salman Rushdie's work, this study argues that transnational fiction refuses the simple oppositions of postcolonial theory and suggests the possibility of an inclusive global literature.

Exploring the deeply translational and transnational nature of the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, this book argues that all his work is unified by the permanent presence of three cultures and languages: Russian, English and French. In particular, Julie Loison-Charles focusses on Nabokov's dual nature as both an author and a translator, and the ways in which translation permeates his fictional writing from his very first Russian works to his last novels in English. Although self-translation has received a lot of attention in Nabokov criticism, this book considers his work as an author-translator, drawing particular attention to his often underappreciated and underestimated, but no less crucial, third language; French. Looking at Nabokov's encounters with pseudotranslation, Julie Loison-Charles demonstrates the influence this had on his practice as both a translator and a writer, arguing that this experience was crucial to his ability to create bridges between the literary traditions of Europe, Russia and America. The book also triangulates his practice and theory of translation for Onegin with those of Chateaubriand and Venuti to illuminate Nabokov's transnational vision of literature and his ethics of translation before presenting a robust case for reconsidering his collaborative translations in French as mediated self-translations.

Published in 1999 to mark the centenary of Vladimir Nabokov's birth, this volume brings together the work of eleven of the world's foremost Nabokov scholars offering perspectives on the writer and his fiction. Their essays cover a broad range of topics and approaches, from close readings of major texts, including Speak, Memory and Pale Fire, to penetrating discussions of the significant relationship between Nabokov's personal beliefs and experiences and his art. Several of the essays attempt to uncover the artistic principles that underlie the author's literary creations, while others seek to place Nabokov's work in a variety of literary and cultural contexts. Among these essays are a first glimpse at a little-known work, The Tragedy of Mr Morn, as well as a perspective on Nabokov's most famous novel, Lolita. The volume as a whole offers valuable insight into Nabokov scholarship.

Vladimir Nabakov considers the novelist's aesthetic precepts and practice and the distinctive character of his work and the book also gives consideration of his fiction in the larger context of the modernist and postmodernist enterprise. It analyses the importance of the novels' challenges to all sorts of aesthetic and moral presumptions (including some of Nabakov's own). Readers are thus encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the issues raised in Nabakov's work.

In Nabokov’s Mimicry of Freud: Art as Science, Teckyoung Kwon examines the manner in which Nabokov invited his readers to engage in his ongoing battle against psychoanalysis. Kwon looks at Nabokov’s use of literary devices that draw upon psychology and biology, characters that either imitate Freud or Nabokov in behavior or thought, and Jamesian concepts of time, memory, and consciousness in The Defense, Despair, Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada. As Kwon notes, the transfiguration of biological mimicry and memory into an artistic form involves numerous components, including resemblance with a difference, contingency, the double, riddles, games, play, theatricality, transgression, metamorphosis, and combinational concoction. Nabokov, as a mimic, functions as a poet who is also a scientist, while his model, Freud, operates as a scientist who is also a poet. Both writers were gifted humorists, regarding art as a formidable vehicle for the repudiation of all forms of totality. This book is recommended for scholars of psychology, literary studies, film studies, and philosophy.

div Vladimir Nabokov’s “Western choice”—his exile to the West after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—allowed him to take a crucial literary journey, leaving the closed nineteenth-century Russian culture behind and arriving in the extreme openness of twentieth-century America. In Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics, Nina L. Khrushcheva offers the novel hypothesis that because of this journey, the works of Russian-turned-American Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) are highly relevant to the political transformation under way in Russia today. Khrushcheva, a Russian living in America, finds in Nabokov’s novels a useful guide for Russia’s integration into the globalized world. Now one of Nabokov’s “Western” characters herself, she discusses the cultural and social realities of contemporary Russia that he foresaw a half-century earlier. In Pale Fire; Ada, or Ardor; Pnin; and other works, Nabokov reinterpreted the traditions of Russian fiction, shifting emphasis from personal misery and communal life to the notion of forging one’s own “happy” destiny. In the twenty-first century Russia faces a similar challenge, Khrushcheva contends, and Nabokov’s work reveals how skills may be acquired to cope with the advent of democracy, capitalism, and open borders. /DIV

First published in 1995. This companion constitutes a virtual encyclopaedia of Nabokov, and occupies a unique niche in scholarship about him. Articles on individual works by Nabokov, including his short stories and poetry, provide a brief survey of critical reactions and detailed analyses from diverse vantage points. For anyone interested in Nabokov, from scholars to readers who love his works, this is an ideal guide. Its chronology of Nabokov's life and works, bibliographies of primary and secondary works, and a detailed index make it easy to find reliable information any aspect of Nabokov's rich legacy.