Women In Nabokov S Life And Art

This volume discusses women in Nabokov. It has two parts: In the first one, there are biographical essays on the role of the real women in Nabokov's life and how their love and suffering are reflected in his prose. The second part deals with Nabokov's women in his fiction.

In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.

Leven en werk van de Amerikaanse schrijver van Russische origine Vladimir Vladimirovič Nabokov (1899-1977).

This volume studies the enigmatic but silent heroines Nabokov brings to the page. Chapter 4, "Nabokov's Mermaid: 'Spring in Fialta'" by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, is not available in the ebook format due to digital rights restrictions. You can find the earlier version of the chapter in the journal Nabokov Studies.

"At once a love story, a portrait of a marriage, and an answer to a riddle, Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) explores a remarkable literary partnership - that of a woman who devoted her life to her husband's art and a man who dedicated his works to his wife. Open a volume of Nabokov's, and there is Vera on the dedication page, front and center. But search for her elsewhere, and the woman to whom the author of Lolita was married for fifty-two years, who carried on his correspondence in his name, fades from view." "Stacy Schiff has now restored her to life. Schiff follows Vera Nabokov from her affluent St. Petersburg childhood, through the dramatic escape from Bolshevik Russia, to the streets of Weimar Berlin, where Vera makes a spectacular entrance into the life of her future husband, then a gifted but struggling writer of Russian verse. In the three decades that pass before he metamorphoses into the celebrated author of Lolita, Vera proves to be nothing less than his full creative partner. She had a need to do something great with her life. And as he made clear from the start, her husband had a very great need of her. Publishers, relatives, colleagues, agreed: "He would have been nowhere without her."" "She transcribed her memories of their son's early days go that Nabokov could draw on them for Speak, Memory. She was at all times his first reader, his memory, his foil, his muse. She corrected his stories in German, his memoir in French, his poetry in Italian - and translated Pale Fire into Russian when in her eighties. Through it all, she proved a woman of uncanny wisdom, a conventional wife with a splendidly unconventional mind."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The story of Nabokov's life continues with his arrival in the United States in 1940. He found that supporting himself and his family was not easy--until the astonishing success of Lolita catapulted him to world fame and financial security.

Lucy Maddox's sensitive treatment of Nabokov's eight finished novels written in English—Pale Fire, Ada, Lolita, Bend Sinister, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Transparent Things, Look at the Harlequins! and Pnin—approaches the novelist's work as significant fiction with its own integrity. Maddox provides the kind of discursive introduction that makes Nabokov's complex work more accessible, focusing on the relationship between the eccentric, artificial structures of the novels and their deeply traditional, humanistic themes. While the forms of the novels are idiosyncratic and often bizarre, says Maddox, the texts themselves are neither unfamiliar nor eccentric. Repeatedly the text is the frustration of desire or loss, which is for Nabokov the most agonizing and inescapable of human experiences. Maddox also traces through all eight novels the development of Nabokov's style, which she treats as a matter of both technique and vision.

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.