'Speak, memory', said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and family hangers-on and of grand old houses in St Petersburg and the surrounding countryside in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Young love, butterflies, tutors and a multitude of other themes thread together to weave an autobiography, which is itself a work of art. Part of a major new series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and Pale Fire, in Penguin Classics.

The book pursues a usage-oriented strategy of language description by infusing it with the central concept of post-structural semiotics and literary theory - that of intertextual memory. Its principal claim is that all new facts of language are grounded in the speakers' memory of previous experiences of using language. It is a "speech to speech" model: every new fact of speech is seen as emerging out of recalled fragments that are reiterated and manipulated at the same time. By the same token, the new meaning is always superscribed on something familiar and recognizable as its (more or less radical) alteration. The model offers a way to describe the meaning of language as an open-ended process, the way the meaning of literary works is described in modern literary criticism. The basic unit of the intertextual model is the Communicative Fragment (CF). A CF is a fraction of speech of any shape, meaning, and stylistic provenance, which speakers recognize and, as a consequence, treat as a whole. Its chief attributes are a prefabricated shape, an integral meaning (i.e., perceived as a whole whose scope always goes beyond the analyzable), and a specific communicative "texture" alluding at a speech genre, a tangible speech situation, and profiles of the speaker and the implied addressee. Although a CF has a recognizable shape, it is not as definitively set as that of stationary linguistic signs (words and morphemes). A CF can be tempered with, truncated or expanded, adapted to and fused with other CFs. The book describes in detail typical devices by which speakers manipulate their resources of linguistic memory, whose ever-new constellations in speech create infinite possibilities for new variations and shades of meaning. The book is of interest to linguists in such diverse fields as Cognitive Linguistics, discourse analysis, functional linguistics, language pedagogy, translation studies, semiotics, and the philosophy of language.

Whereas literary criticism has mainly oscillated between “the death of the author” (Barthes) and “the return of the author” (Couturier), this work suggests another perspective on authorship through an analysis of Nabokov’s prefaces. It is here argued that the author, being neither dead nor tyrannical, alternates between authoritative apparitions and receding disappearances in the double gesture of mastery without mastery which Derrida calls ‘exappropriation’, that is, a simultaneous attempt to appropriate one’s work, control it, have it under one’s power and expropriate it, losing control by loosening one’s grip. The intention of this is to approach, through one’s experience of reading and interpreting, the experience of self-effacement and impersonality pertaining to writing (cf. Blanchot). Prefaces are considered to be suitable places for the deconstruction of the classical image of Nabokov’s arrogance through the unearthing of his reserve and vulnerability. This work provides an account of the mere intuition (which, therefore, does not pretend to be a conclusive and definitive interpretation) of another image of Nabokov whose undeniable talent for deception seems in accordance with a need for discretion and secrecy.

The fifteen essays in this volume explore the extraordinary range and diversity of the autobiographical mode in twentieth-century Russian literature from various critical perspectives. They will whet the appetite of readers interested in penetrating beyond the canonical texts of Russian literature. The introduction focuses on the central issues and key problems of current autobiographical theory and practice in both the West and in the Soviet Union, while each essay treats an aspect of auto-biographical praxis in the context of an individual author's work and often in dialogue with another of the included writers. Examined here are first the experimental writings of the early years of the twentieth century--Rozanov, Remizov, and Bely; second, the unique autobiographical statements of the mid-1920s through the early 1940s--Mandelstam, Pasternak, Olesha, and Zoshchenko; and finally, the diverse and vital contemporary writings of the 1960s through the 1980s as exemplified not only by creative writers but also by scholars, by Soviet citizens as well as by emigrs--Trifonov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Lydia Ginzburg, Nabokov, Jakobson, Sinyavsky, and Limonov. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In recent decades, theologians and philosophers of religion have engaged in a vigorous debate concerning the status and nature of ecclesiology. Throughout this debate, they have found resources for their arguments in concepts of political philosophy, particularly communitarianism and political liberalism. In this groundbreaking study, Peter Dula turns instead to the work of philosopher Stanley Cavell, examining the ways in which Cavell's understanding of companionship contributes to the debate over church and community. Since the 1960s, Stanley Cavell has been the most category-defying philosopher in North America, as well as one of the least understood. Philosophers did not know what to make of his deep engagement with literature and film, or, stranger yet, with his openness to theological concerns. In this, the first English study of Cavell and theology, Dula places Cavell in conversation with some of the philosophers most influential in contemporary theology: Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum and John Rawls. He then examines Cavell's relationship to Christian theology, shedding light on the repeated appearances of the figure of Christ in Cavell's writings. Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology finds in Cavell's account of skepticism and acknowledgment a transformative resource for theological discussions - not just of ecclesiology, but of sin, salvation and the existence of God.

With sly sophistication and ebullient charm, Lila Azam Zanganeh shares the intoxication of delirious joy to be found in reading - in particular, in reading the masterpieces of 'the great writer of happiness' Vladimir Nabokov. Plunging into the enchanted and luminous worlds of Speak, Memory; Ada, or Ardor; and the infamous Lolita, Zanganeh seeks out the Nabokovian experience of time, memory, sexual passion, nature, loss, love in all its forms, language in all its allusions. She explores his geography - his Russian childhood, his European sojourns, the landscapes of 'his' America - suffers encounters with his beloved 'nature' hallucinates an interview with the master, and seeks the 'crunch of happiness' in his singular vocabulary. This rhapsodic and beautifully illuminated book will both reignite the passion of experienced lovers of Nabokov's work, and lure the innocent reader to a well of delights.

Psychobiography is often attacked by critics who feel that it trivializes complex adult personalities, "explaining the large deeds of great individuals", as George Will wrote, "by some slight the individual suffered at a tender age - say, seven, when his mother took away a lollipop". Worse yet, some writers have clearly abused psychobiography - for instance, to grind axes from the right (Nancy Clinch on the Kennedy family) or from the left (Fawn Brodie on Richard Nixon) - and others have offered woefully inept diagnoses (such as Albert Goldman's portrait of Elvis Presley as a "split personality" and a "delusional paranoid"). And yet, as Alan Elms argues in Uncovering Lives, in the hands of a skilled practitioner, psychobiography can rival the very best traditional biography in the insights it offers. Elms makes a strong case for the value of psychobiography, arguing in large part from example. Indeed, most of the book features Elms's own fascinating case studies of over a dozen prominent figures, among them Sigmund Freud (the father of psychobiography), B.F. Skinner, Isaac Asimov, L. Frank Baum, Vladimir Nabokov, Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Saddam Hussein, and Henry Kissinger. These profiles make intriguing reading. For example, Elms discusses the fiction of Isaac Asimov in light of the latter's acrophobia (fear of heights) and mild agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) - and Elms includes excerpts from a series of letters between himself and Asimov. He reveals an unintended subtext of The Wizard of Oz - that males are weak, females are strong (think of Scarecrow, Tin Man, the Lion, and the Wizard, versus the good and bad witches and Dorothy herself) - and traces this in part to Baum'schildhood heart disease, which kept him from strenuous activity, and to his relationship with his mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, a distinguished advocate of women's rights. And in a fascinating chapter, he examines the abused childhood of Saddam Hussein, the privileged childhood of George Bush, and the radically different psychological paths that led these two men into the Persian Gulf War. Elms supports each study with extensive research, much of it never presented before - for instance, on how some of the most revealing portions of C.G. Jung's autobiography were deleted in spite of his protests before publication. Along the way, Elms provides much insight into how psychobiography is written. Finally, he proposes clear guidelines for judging high quality work, and offers practical tips for anyone interested in writing in this genre. Written with great clarity and wit, Uncovering Lives illuminates the contributions that psychology can make to biography. Elms's enthusiasm for his subject is contagious and will inspire would-be psychobiographers as well as win over the most hardened skeptics.

In this unusual biography, Michael Menager coaxes from the shadows of history ?ve women who devoted themselves to the greatness of a genius in their lives. At times the book reads like a love story, at other times an adventure, but throughout, their five lives intertwine to tell one story of selfless devotion and a greatness that doesn’t crave recognition. This book covers the lives and works of Maria Nhys (wife of Aldous Huxley), Françoise Gilot (mistress of Pablo Picasso), Véra Nabokov (wife of Vladimir Nabokov), Helen Dukas (secretary to Albert Einstein), and Isabel Burton (wife and partner of Sir Richard Burton).

The foundational text for the acclaimed New York Times and international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran The ruler of a totalitarian state seeks validation from a former schoolmate, now the nation's foremost thinker, in order to access a cultural cache alien to his regime. A literary critic provides commentary on an unfinished poem that both foretells the poet's death and announces the critic's secret identity as the king of a lost country. The greatest of Vladimir Nabokov's enchanters--Humbert--is lost within the antithesis of a fairy story, in which Lolita does not hold the key to his past but rather imprisons him within the knowledge of his distance from that past. In this precursor to her international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi deftly explores the worlds apparently lost to Nabokov's characters, their portals of access to those worlds, and how other worlds hold a mirror to Nabokov's experiences of physical, linguistic, and recollective exile. Written before Nafisi left the Islamic Republic of Iran, and now published in English for the first time and with a new introduction by the author, this book evokes the reader's quintessential journey of discovery and reveals what caused Nabokov to distinctively shape and reshape that journey for the author.