Despair (Vintage International)

by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Book Description

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965--thirty years after its original publication--Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder.

Ada or Ardor a Family Chronicle

by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Book Description

Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. But more: it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat.

This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

Speak, Memory : An Autobiography Revisited

by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

The late Vladimir Nabokov always did things his way, and his classic autobiography is no exception. No dry recital of dates, names, and addresses for this linguistic magician--instead, Speak, Memory is a succession of lapidary episodes, in which the factoids play second fiddle to the development of Nabokov's sensibility. There is, to be sure, an impressionistic whirl through the author's family history (including a gallery of Tartar princes and fin-de-siècle oddities). And Nabokov's account of his tenure at St. Petersburg's famous Tenishev School--where he counted Osip Mandelstam among his schoolmates--offers a lovely glimpse into the heart of Russia's silver age. Still, Nabokov is much too artful an autobiographer to present Speak, Memory as a slice of reality--a word, by the way, that he insisted must always be surrounded by quotation marks

Book Description

A rich evocation of Nabokov's life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including LOLITA, PNIN, DESPAIR, THE GIFT and others.

Vladimir Nabokov : Novels and Memoirs 1941-1951 : The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Speak, Memory (Library of America)

by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Brian Boyd (Editor)

Book Description

After a brilliant literary career in Russian, Vladimir Nabokov came to the United States and went on to an even more brilliant one in English--earning a place as one of the greatest writers of his adopted home. Between 1941 and 1974 he published the autobiography and eight novels now collected by The Library of America in an authoritative three-volume set. "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer's half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the famous novelist's life. "Bend Sinister," Nabokov's most explicitly political novel, is the haunting, dreamlike story of a quiet philosophy professor caught up in the bureaucratic terror of a totalitarian police state. "Speak, Memory" is the dazzling memoir of Nabokov's childhood in imperial Russia amd exile in Europe. The texts in this volume have been corrected based on the author's own copies. Two companion volumes collect "Lolita," "Pnin," "Pale Fire," and "Lolita: A Screenplay," and "Ada," "Transparent Things," and "Look at the Harlequins!"