Non-Fiction Books

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.

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 Madame 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. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers.

The acclaimed author presents his unique insights into the works of great Russian authors including Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorky, 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 nineteenth-century Russian literature, with analysis and commentary on Nikolay Gogol’s Dead Souls and “The Overcoat”; Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons ; Maxim Gorky’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 Dostoevsky, 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

A fastidiously shaped series of lectures based on a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the Spanish classic. Rejecting the common interpretation of Don Quixote as a warm satire, Nabokov perceives the work as a catalog of cruelty through which the gaunt knight passes. Edited and with a Preface by Fredson Bowers; photographs.

Over four hundred letters chronicle the author's career, recording his struggles in the publishing world, the battles over "Lolita," and his relationship with his wife.

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.

The letters of the great writer to his wife--in their first publication--tell a long and beguiling love story and document anew the creative energies of an artist who was always at work. No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer is quite as beguiling as that of Vladimir Nabokov's to Vera 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 meeting in 1923, Vladimir's letters to Vera form a narrative arc that tells a half-century long love story, one that is playful, romantic, pithy, and memorable. At the same time, the letters tell us much about the man and the writer. We see the infectious fascination with which Vladimir observed everything--animals, people, speech, the landscapes he encountered--and learn of the poems, plays, stories, novels, memoirs, screenplays, and translations on which he worked ceaselessly. This delicious volume contains 21 photographs, as well as facsimiles of the letters themselves and the puzzles and doodles Vladimir often sent to Vera.Edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd."

Nabokov's dream diary, published for the first time―and placed in biographical and literary context On October 14, 1964, Vladimir Nabokov, a lifelong insomniac, began a curious experiment. Over the next eighty days, immediately upon waking, he wrote down his dreams, following the instructions he found in An Experiment with Time by the British philosopher John Dunne. The purpose was to test the theory that time may go in reverse, so that, paradoxically, a later event may generate an earlier dream. The result―published here for the first time―is a fascinating diary in which Nabokov recorded sixty-four dreams (and subsequent daytime episodes) on 118 index cards, which afford a rare glimpse of the artist at his most private. More than an odd biographical footnote, the experiment grew out of Nabokov’s passionate interest in the mystery of time, which influenced many of his novels, including the late masterpiece Ada . Insomniac Dreams , edited by leading Nabokov authority Gennady Barabtarlo, presents the text of Nabokov’s dream experiment, illustrated with a selection of his original index cards, and provides rich annotations and analysis that put them in the context of his life and writings. The book also includes previously unpublished records of Nabokov’s dreams from his letters and notebooks and shows important connections between his fiction and private writings on dreams and time.

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.