Imagining Nabokov

Download or read book Imagining Nabokov written by Nina L. Khrushcheva and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: div Vladimir Nabokov’s “Western choice”—his exile to the West after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—allowed him to take a crucial literary journey, leaving the closed nineteenth-century Russian culture behind and arriving in the extreme openness of twentieth-century America. In Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics, Nina L. Khrushcheva offers the novel hypothesis that because of this journey, the works of Russian-turned-American Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) are highly relevant to the political transformation under way in Russia today. Khrushcheva, a Russian living in America, finds in Nabokov’s novels a useful guide for Russia’s integration into the globalized world. Now one of Nabokov’s “Western” characters herself, she discusses the cultural and social realities of contemporary Russia that he foresaw a half-century earlier. In Pale Fire; Ada, or Ardor; Pnin; and other works, Nabokov reinterpreted the traditions of Russian fiction, shifting emphasis from personal misery and communal life to the notion of forging one’s own “happy” destiny. In the twenty-first century Russia faces a similar challenge, Khrushcheva contends, and Nabokov’s work reveals how skills may be acquired to cope with the advent of democracy, capitalism, and open borders. /DIV

Download or read book Imagining Nabokov written by Nina L. Khrushcheva and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nabokov's exile to the West allowed him to leave behind the hermetic culture of Russia and partake in the extreme openness of 20th-century America. This study finds that this resulted in his works reinterpreting the traditions of Russian fiction shifting the emphasis from personal misery to the idea of forging one's own destiny.

Download or read book Nabokov's Theatrical Imagination written by Siggy Frank and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wealth of unpublished archival material, this study offers a comprehensive assessment of the importance of theatrical performance in Vladimir Nabokov's thinking and writing. Siggy Frank provides fresh insights into Nabokov's wider aesthetics and arrives at new readings of his narrative fiction. As well as emphasising the importance of theatrical performance to our understanding of Nabokov's texts, she demonstrates that the theme of theatricality runs through the central concerns of Nabokov's art and life: the nature of fiction, the relationship between the author and his fictional world, textual origin and derivation, authorial control and textual property, literary appropriations and adaptations, and finally the transformation of the writer himself from the Russian émigré writer Sirin to the American novelist Nabokov.

Download or read book Representation and the Imagination written by Daniel Albright and published by . This book was released on with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book That Other World written by Azar Nafisi and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The foundational text for the acclaimed international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran “Empathetic, incisive. . . . A sweeping overview of Nabokov's major works. . . . Graceful [and] discerning.”—Kirkus Reviews 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.

Download or read book Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination written by R. Trousdale and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Vladimir Nabokov and Salman Rushdie's work, this study argues that transnational fiction refuses the simple oppositions of postcolonial theory and suggests the possibility of an inclusive global literature.

Download or read book The Feud written by Alex Beam and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2016 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 1940 Edmund Wilson was the undisputed big dog of American letters. Vladimir Nabokov was a near-penniless Russian exile seeking asylum in the States. Wilson became a mentor to Nabokov, introducing him to every editor of note, assigning reviews for The New Republic, engineering a Guggenheim. Their intimate friendship blossomed over a shared interest in all things Russian, ruffled a bit by political disagreements. But then came Lolita, and suddenly Nabokov was the big (and very rich) dog. Finally the feud erupted in full when Nabokov published his hugely footnoted and virtually unreadable literal translation of Pushkin's famously untranslatable verse novel Eugene Onegin. Wilson attacked his friend's translation with hammer and tong in the New York Review of Books. Nabokov counterattacked in the same publication. Back and forth the increasingly aggressive letters volleyed until their friendship was reduced to ashes by the narcissism of small differences"--