Most Popular Books by Vladimir Nabokov

The acclaimed author of Lolita offers unique insight into works by James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jane Austen, and others—with an introduction by John Updike. In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov''s teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. This volume collects Nabokov''s famous lectures on Western European literature, with analysis and commentary on Charles Dickens''s Bleak House, Gustav Flaubert''s Madam Bovary, Marcel Proust''s The Walk by Swann''s Place, Robert Louis Stevenson''s "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and other works. This volume also includes photographic reproductions of Nabokov''s original notes, revealing his own edits, underlined passages, and more. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers Introduction by John Updike

In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, mangled by it, with nowhere to escape to. Their dreams lie stifled, smothered by routine and repetition, and frustrations lurk in all the corners. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can be snatched, waylay their victims. Like the shimmer of the sea, the gleam of a glass caught by the sun, they sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve again. Two of the stories, ''First Love'' and ''Mademoiselle O'', are autobiographical, and ''The Assistant Producer'' is based on real events, but the rest are pure flights of fantasy - or the stuff that life is weaved of?

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a perversely magical literary detective story -- subtle, intricate, leading to a tantalizing climax -- about the mysterious life of a famous writer. Many people knew things about Sebastian Knight as a distinguished novelist, but probably fewer than a dozen knew of the two love affairs that so profoundly influenced his career, the second one in such a disastrous way. After Knight''s death, his half brother sets out to penetrate the enigma of his life, starting with a few scanty clues in the novelist''s private papers. His search proves to be a story as intriguing as any of his subject''s own novels, as baffling, and, in the end, as uniquely rewarding. "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." -John Updike

Like Kafka''s The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude," an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws, who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When Cincinnatus is led out to be executed, he simply wills his executioners out of existence: they disappear, along with the whole world they inhabit.

''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.

A dying man cautiously unravels the mysteries of memory and creation. Vadim is a Russian émigré who, like Nabokov, is a novelist, poet and critic. There are threads linking the fictional hero with his creator as he reconstructs the images of his past from young love to his serious illness. • "Good farce throbbing with his well-known obsessions." -V.S. Pritchett, The New York Review ''Look at the harlequins ... Play! Invent the world! Invent reality''. This is the childhood advice given by an aunt to Russian born writer Vadim Vadimovich, who emigrates to England, then Paris, then Germany and then the US. Now dying, he reconstructs his past. He remembers Iris his first wife, Annette his long-necked typist, and Bel his daughter, as well as his own bizarre illness, ''numerical nimbus syndrome''.

After multiple postings in various armies, Nikolay Galatov, an itinerant soldier, is living in Berlin. Every now and then he remembers Olga Kind, a woman he left behind in St. Petersburg seven years ago. He decides to go and find her. Filled with teasing plot lines, misrepresentations and narrative traps, The Doorbell is an exploration of character, interaction and awkward suspense. Once again examining the themes of loss, separation and exile, Vladimir Nabokov weaves a tale of unexpected turnings and non-happenings, playing with the conventions of traditional, predictable fiction.

"Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster." Thus begins Vladimir Nabokov''s Laughter in the Dark; this, the author tells us, is the whole story except that he starts from here, with his characteristic dazzling skill and irony, and brilliantly turns a fable into a chilling, original novel of folly and destruction. Amidst a Weimar-era milieu of silent film stars, artists, and aspirants, Nabokov creates a merciless masterpiece as Albinus, an aging critic, falls prey to his own desires, to his teenage mistress, and to Axel Rex, the scheming rival for her affections who finds his greatest joy in the downfall of others. Published first in Russian as Kamera Obskura in 1932, this book appeared in Nabokov''s own English translation six years later. This New Directions edition, based on the text as Nabokov revised it in 1960, features a new introduction by Booker Prize-winner John Banville."

Though we know Vladimir Nabokov as a brilliant novelist, his first love was poetry. This landmark collection brings together the best of his verse, including many pieces that have never before appeared in English. These poems span the whole of Nabokov’s career, from the newly discovered “Music,” written in 1914, to the short, playful “To Véra,” composed in 1974. Many are newly translated by Dmitri Nabokov, including The University Poem, a sparkling novel in verse modeled on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin that constitutes a significant new addition to Nabokov’s oeuvre. Included too are such poems as “Lilith”, an early work which broaches the taboo theme revisited nearly forty years later in Lolita, and “An Evening of Russian Poetry”, a masterpiece in which Nabokov movingly mourns his lost language in the guise of a versified lecture on Russian delivered to college girls. The subjects range from the Russian Revolution to the American refrigerator, taking in on the way motel rooms, butterflies, ice-skating, love, desire, exile, loneliness, language, and poetry itself; and the poet whirls swiftly between the brilliantly painted facets of his genius, wearing masks that are, by turns, tender, demonic, sincere, self-parodying, shamanic, visionary, and ingeniously domestic.

Novelist, poet, critic, translator, and, above all, a peerless imaginer, Vladimir Nabokov was arguably the most dazzling prose stylist of the twentieth century. In novels like Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, he turned language into an instrument of ecstasy. Vintage Nabokov includes sections 1-10 of his most famous and controversial novel, Lolita; the stories “The Return of Chorb,” “The Aurelian,” “A Forgotten Poet,” “Time and Ebb,” “Signs and Symbols,” “The Vane Sisters,” and “Lance”; and chapter 12 from his memoir Speak, Memory. Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the greatest modern writers. "It was Nabokov’s gift to bring paradise wherever he alighted.” —John Updike, The New York Review of Books

Lolita, la más famosa y controversial novela de Vladimir Nabokov, cuenta la historia de la obsesión devoradora del cuarentón Humbert Humbert por la nínfula Dolores Haze. Ternura y fascinación —además de tristeza y un humor mordaz— llenan sus páginas pero es, por encima de todo, una meditación sobre el amor—el amor como abuso y alucinación, locura y transformación.

Nabokov''s wise, ironic, and elegant masterpiece. • A controversial love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. • This annotated edition assiduously illuminates the extravagant wordplay and the frequent literary allusions, parodies, and cross-references. • Edited with a preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel, Jr. "Fascinatingly detailed." -Edmund Morris, The New York Times Book Review When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. Awe and exhilaration–along with heartbreak and mordant wit–abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert''s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love–love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

Nikolai Gogol was the most idiosyncratic of the great Russian novelists of the 19th century and lived a tragically short life which was as chaotic as the lives of the characters he created. This biography begins with Gogol''s death and ends with his birth, an inverted structure typical of both Gogol and Nabokov. The biographer proceeds to establish the relationship between Gogol and his novels, especially with regard to "nose-consciousness", a peculiar feature of Russian life and letters, which finds its apotheosis in Gogol''s own life and prose. There are more expressions and proverbs concerning the nose in Russian than in any other language in the world. Nabokov''s style in this biography is comic, but as always leads to serious issues—in this case, an appreciation of the distinctive "sense of the physical" inherent in Gogol''s work. Nabokov describes how Gogol''s life and literature mingled, and explains the structure and style of Gogol''s prose in terms of the novelist''s life.

Early dramatic works—plus two essays—by the author of Lolita and Pale Fire. Including The Man from the USSR, The Event, The Pole, and The Grand-dad, this volume collects works for the theater written during Vladimir Nabokov''s émigré years, before his writings in English earned him worldwide fame and made him a seven-time National Book Award finalist. Also included are two of his essays on drama: "Playwriting" and "The Tragedy of Tragedy." Translated and with introductions by Dmitri Nabokov, this collection offers a fascinating glimpse into the work of the novelist, one of the twentieth century''s acknowledged literary geniuses.