New Releases by Vladimir Nabokov

No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer is quite as beguiling as that of Vladimir Nabokov’s to Véra Slonim. She shared his delight at the enchantment of life’s trifles and literature’s treasures, and he rated her as having the best and quickest sense of humor of any woman he had met. From their first encounter in 1923, Vladimir’s letters to Véra chronicle a half-century-long love story, one that is playful, romantic, and memorable. At the same time, the letters reveal much about their author. We see the infectious fascination with which Vladimir observed everything—animals, people, speech, landscapes and cityscapes—and glimpse his ceaseless work on his poems, plays, stories, novels, memoirs, screenplays, and translations. This delightful volume is enhanced by twenty-one photographs, as well as facsimiles of the letters and the puzzles and drawings Vladimir often sent to Véra. With 8 pages of photographs and 47 illustrations in text

The acclaimed author presents his unique insights into the works of great Russian authors including Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Gogol, Gorki, and Chekhov. 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 19th century Russian literature, with analysis and commentary on Nikolay Gogol''s Dead Souls and "The Overcoat"; Ivan Turgenev''s Fathers and Sons; Maxim Gorki''s "On the Rafts"; Leo Tolstoy''s Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych; two short stories and a play by Anton Chekhov; and several works by Fyodor Dostoevski, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed. This volume also includes Nabokov''s lectures on the art of translation, the nature of Russian censorship, and other topics. Featured throughout the volume are photographic reproductions of Nabokov''s original notes. "This volume . . . never once fails to instruct and stimulate. This is a great Russian talking of great Russians." —Anthony Burgess Introduction by Fredson Bowers

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.

Nikolai Gogol was one of the great geniuses of nineteenth century Russian literature, with a command of the irrational unmatched by any writer before or since. His strange tales, though often read as forceful demands for social change, were displays of the fantasies of the human spirit. In this ideal marriage of subject and critic, Nabokov analyses his endlessly inventive compatriot, focusing on the masterpieces Dead Souls, ''The Overcoat'' and ''The Government Inspector''. Misunderstood by his contemporaries, mishandled by theatre directors and ending his life mistreated by doctors - with medicinal leeches hanging from his exceptional nose - it took Nabokov to give Gogol, ''the oddest Russian in Russia'', the critical biography he and his singular, brilliant work deserve.

Vladimir Nabokov’s earliest major work, written when he was twenty-four, is a full-length play in verse of Shakespearean beauty and richness. The story of an incognito king whose love for the wife of a banished revolutionary brings on the chaos the king has fought to prevent, this five-act play was never published in Nabokov’s lifetime and lay in manuscript until it appeared in a Russian literary journal in 1997. It is an astonishingly precocious work, in exquisite verse, touching for the first time on what would become this great writer’s major themes: intense sexual desire and jealousy, the elusiveness of happiness, the power of the imagination, and the eternal battle between truth and fantasy. The Tragedy of Mister Morn is Nabokov’s major response to the Russian Revolution, which he had lived through, but it approaches the events of 1917 through the prism of Shakespearean tragedy. Translated by Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan

From the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales--eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time--display all the shades of Nabokov''s imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur''s samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers and intoxicating draft of the master''s genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.

Considered by many to be the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. • An interweaving of the effects of life and memory, tradition and heritage, upon art, the book tells of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished poet seeking fame in the phantasmic world of Berlin in the 1920s. "A fascinating lesson in the truly staggering number of possible ways of writing and seeing." -Kirkus Reviews The Gift is the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev, a writer living in the closed world of Russian intellectuals in Berlin shortly after the First World War. This gorgeous tapestry of literature follows the pursuits of an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write. The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of the initial period of his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others.

"Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of the hero--sullen, gawky Hugh Person--to Switzerland . . . As a young publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride. . . . Eight years later--following a murder, a period of madness and a brief imprisonment--Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle out his past. . . . The several strands of dream, memory, and time [are] set off against the literary theorizing of R. and, more centrally, against the world of observable objects." --Martin Amis

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. It is first and foremost a compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up 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.

A farcical detective story and a profoundly refractive tale about a Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife. • A wonderfully layered exploration of the vicissitudes of identity, appearance, and the loss of self. Smurov, a lovelorn and excruciatingly self-conscious Russian tutor, shoots himself after a beating by his mistress'' husband. Unsure whether his suicide has been successful or not, Smurov drifts around Berlin, observing his acquaintances, but finds he can discover very little about his own life from the opinions of his distracted, confused fellow-émigrés.

On the country estate of his art-collecting uncle, Van Veen meets Ada, his beautiful cousin. Their relationship flourishes, but both were born into one of America''s illustrious families, a vast over-extended empire, and this causes problems for the lovers.

The screenplay for Kubrick’s 1962 film tells the story of an older man’s obsession with a young girl. • This is the purely Nabokov version of the screenplay and not the same version which was produced as the motion picture Lolita, distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. “A few days before, at a private screening, I had discovered that Kubrick was a great director, that his Lolita was a first-rate film with magnificent actors, and that only ragged odds and ends of my script had been used. The modifications, the garbling of my best little finds, the omission of entire scenes, the addition of new ones, and all sorts of other changes may not have been sufficient to erase my name from the credit titles but they certainly made the picture as unfaithful to the original script as an American poet’s translation from Rimbaud or Pasternak. I hasten to add that my present comments should definitely not be construed as reflecting any belated grudge, any high-pitched deprecation of Kubrick’s creative approach. When adapting Lolita to the speaking screen he saw my novel in one way, I saw it in another – that’s all, nor can one deny that infinite fidelity may be an author’s ideal but can prove a producer’s ruin.” --- From the foreword

The famous novel about a European intellectual in America, whose obsessive desire to possess his step-daughter destroys the lives of those around him.

Glory is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a twenty-two-year-old Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him. "The themes we associate with Nabokov — the romance of emigres, sexual frustration, the nostalgia of youth — shine again, sorrowfully or blithely, but always adding an illuminating dimension to what went before or what comes after." -Kirkus Reviews Convinced that his life is about to be wasted and hoping to impress his love, Martin embarks on a "perilous, daredevil project"--an illegal attempt to re-enter the Soviet Union, from which he and his mother had fled in 1919. He succeeds--but at a terrible cost.

The precursor to Nabokov''s classic novel, Lolita. • A middle-aged man weds an unattractive widow in order to indulge his obsession with her daughter. • "A gem to be appreciated by any admirer of the most graceful and provocative literary craftsman." —Chicago Tribune The unnamed protagonist of the story is, outwardly, a respectable and comfortable man; inside, he churns at the pubescent femininity of certain girls. Rare girls – one in a thousand – whose coltish grace and subconscious flirtatiousness betray, to his obsessed mind, a very special bud on the moist verge of its bloom. Sitting on a park bench one day, he is tantalized by the fleeting form of just such a girl roller-skating on a gravel path. His desire to be near this beauty burns in him and drives him to begin a courtship of the child’s pitiful mother – a course that can end only in the disintegration of his life. Over the years, the idea of The Enchanter grew; it changed; it developed “claws and wings.” By 1953 it was ready to furnish the basic theme of Lolita. "The Enchanter is entertaining independent of its Lolita connection. It is arch, delicious and beautifully written." —Publishers Weekly

Nabokov''s third novel, The Luzhin Defense, is a chilling story of obsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen--an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster--but at a cost: in Luzhin'' s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants the world of reality. His own world falls apart during a crucial championship match, when the intricate defense he has devised withers under his opponent''s unexpected and unpredictabke lines of assault.

The wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder. • “A beautiful mystery plot, not to be revealed.” – Newsweek “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” – John Updike “One of Mr. Nabokov’s finest, most challenging and provocative novels.” – The New York Times Despair’s protagonist, Hermann, is another masterly portrait in the fascinating gallery of living characters Vladmir Nabokov has given to world literature. In his pseudo wordliness, his odd genius, Hermann is one with such other heteroclitic neurotic Nabokovian creations as Humbert Humbert and Charles Kimbote. Rapt in his own reality, incapable of escaping or explicating it, he is as solitary in his abyss as Luzhin or Charlotte Haze of Lolita. Despair is illuminated throughout by the virtuosity and cunning wit that are Vladimir Nabokov’s hallmarks.

A darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue from one of the leading writers of the twentieth century, the acclaimed author of Lolita. "Half-poem, half-prose...a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. One of the great works of art of this century." —Mary McCarthy, New York Times bestselling author of The Group An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, Vladimir Nabokov''s witty novel achieves that rarest of things in literature—perfect tragicomic balance.