Nabokov At The Limits

The eleven contributors to this volume investigate the connections between Nabokov's output and the fields of painting, music, and ballet.

The eleven contributors to this volume investigate the connections between Nabokov's output and the fields of painting, music, and ballet.

In recent decades, a growing body of educational scholarship has called into question deeply embedded assumptions about the nature, value and consequences of reason. Education and the Limits of Reason extends this critical conversation, arguing that in seeking to investigate the meaning and significance of reason in human lives, sources other than non-fiction educational or philosophical texts can be helpful. Drawing on the work of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nabokov, the authors demonstrate that literature can allow us to see how reason is understood and expressed, contested and compromised – by distinctive individuals, under particular circumstances, in complex and varied relations with others. Novels, plays and short stories can take us into the workings of a rational or irrational mind and show how the inner world of cognitive activity is shaped by external events. Perhaps most importantly, literature can prompt us to ask searching questions of ourselves; it can unsettle and disturb, and in so doing can make an important contribution to our educational formation. An original and thought provoking work, Education and the Limits of Reason offers a fresh perspective on classic texts by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nabokov, and encourages readers to reconsider conventional views of teaching and learning. This book will appeal to a wide range of academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, literature and philosophy.

"In The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord, Gavriel Shapiro contends that Vladimir Nabokov's worldview and verbal artistry cannot be fully understood without first understanding the relationship between the writer and his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, the distinguished jurist and prominent statesman at the turn of the 20th century, who at the same time was a great connoisseur of literature, painting, theater, and music; a passionate lepidopterist; an enthusiastic chess player; and an avid athlete. Although Nabokov experts have long noted the importance of this relationship, this is the very first book-length study on this crucial subject. In this book, Shapiro explores the unique nature of their bond, which Nabokov characterized asthat of the "tender friendship" marked by the "charm of our perfect accord," particularly exceptional when compared to numerous father-and-son relationships in Russian and Western European literature of the 19th and 20th centuries"--

This first major critical biography of Vladimir Nabokov, one of the greatest of twentieth-century writers, finally allows us full access to the dramatic details of his life and the depths of his art. An intensely private man, Nabokov was uprooted first by the Russian Revolution and then by World War II. Transformed into a permanent wanderer, he did not achieve fame until late in life, with the success of Lolita. In this first of two volumes, Brian Boyd vividly describes the liberal milieu of the aristocratic Nabokovs, their escape from Russia, Nabokov's education at Cambridge, and the murder of his father in Berlin. Boyd then turns to the years that Nabokov spent, impoverished, in Germany and France, until the coming of Hitler forced him to flee, with wife and son, to the United States. This volume stands on its own as a fascinating exploration of Nabokov's Russian years and Russian worlds, prerevolutionary and émigré. In the course of his ten years' work on the biography, Boyd traveled along Nabokov's trail everywhere from Yalta to Palo Alto. The only scholar to have had free access to the Nabokov archives in Montreux and the Library of Congress, he also interviewed at length Nabokov's family and scores of his friends and associates. For the general reader, Boyd offers an introduction to Nabokov the man, his works, and his world. For the specialist, he provides a basis for all future research on Nabokov's life and art, as he dates and describes the composition of all Nabokov's works, published and unpublished. Boyd investigates Nabokov's relation to and his independence from his time, examines the special structures of his mind and thought, and explains the relations between his philosophy and his innovations of literary strategy and style. At the same time he provides succinct introductions to all the fiction, dramas, memoirs, and major verse; presents detailed analyses of the major books that break new ground for the scholar, while providing easy paths into the works for other readers; and shows the relationship between Nabokov's life and the themes and subjects of his art.

Morris re-evaluates Nabokov's poetry and demonstrates that poetry was in fact central to his identity as an author and was the source of his distinctive authorial - lyric - voice.

The letters of the great writer to his wife—gathered here for the first time—chronicle a decades-long 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 Véra Slonim. She shared his delight in 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 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 and cityscapes he encountered—and learn of the poems, plays, stories, novels, memoirs, screenplays and translations on which he worked ceaselessly. This delicious volume contains twenty-one photographs, as well as facsimiles of the letters themselves and the puzzles and doodles Vladimir often sent to Véra.

The cinephobic novelist who complains to Fitzgerald's tycoon that he will never get the hang of scriptwriting wouldn't give a nickel for the movies. Yet never before the appearance of film had human perception been engaged in such an all-encompassing way by a single art form. In this ambitious investigation of a little-studied narrative genre, Gavriel Moses defines and explores "the film novel," a literary text in which cinema provides the thematic, formal, psychological, and philosophical center. Through close readings of works by the major representatives of the genre—Pirandello, Nabokov, Isherwood, West, Fitzgerald, Moravia, Percy, Puig—Moses develops a suggestive theory of novels that use literature to investigate the central role that film has acquired in human experience. These novels, because of their fascination with filmmaker and spectator alike, and because they anticipate current views of the questions of cinema, remain a tangible presence within the repertoire of literary modernism. Offering insightful discussions of Laughter in the Dark, Lancelot, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and other film novels, Moses shows the depth of the exchange between literature and cinema and illustrates the extent to which the way we tell stories with words has been affected by the movies. His book will be of wide interest to literary scholars, film historians, and students of cinema and the novel.