Vladimir Nabokov Books

absolutely beautiful writing. Reading the words Nabokov writes is like fine dining, you can almost taste the words they are so rich and poetic. I do recommend the annotated version unless you are Nobokov. It is just so rich with hidden meaning, symbols, and references to myriad things that it is just impossible to get the full story without it. I wish there was a six star rating!

Having read Lolita over thirty-five years ago, my fondest memories pertain to the comments made by Nabokov in his afterward. Those who would comment on the pornographic nature of the work either ignored this part or misunderstood it.

Appel's annotations are simply insufferable. It's pathetic and depressing to read his sniveling Kinbote impression--is he completely unaware that he represents exactly what Nabokov was mocking in Pale Fire? Even trying to use his annotations as merely a reference to help translate the French in the book will leave you quivering with rage, as Appel submits you to his Stanford ENG 300 course, draws absurd and positively indefensible parallels (some of which that he even admits--with the appropriate quotation from a letter as evidence--Nabokov expressly disavowed), reveals the entire narrative by page 70, and, in a meta-textual burlesque (which, ever self-aware and oh-so-meta, Appel audaciously compares to the effect created by Pale Fire) completely robs your reading experience of the chance to form its own impression of the work.

Under no circumstances buy this drivel. Nasha Vladishka deserves better.

First: Nabokov is a fierce talent; he writes, transcending language, with the whole literary tradition a pun's breath away. Greatest stylist of modern times, etc. Lolita needs no introduction: if you are here, you know.

The Annotated Lolita (2nd edition) also defies easy description. It is incredibly rare for two things to come together so marvelously: 1) A work of Lolita's breadth and caliber, 2) A detailed, scholarly, and inveterately prudent *analysis* of authorial mechanics.

Appel's volume achieves all of this. You may read Lolita for the first time here, no problem - there is ample pencil-space, an astute introduction (perhaps borrowing excessively from Nabokov's Pale Fire, but no matter), and clearly-marked endnotes. The endnotes, often 3-5 per page, track virtually all of Nabokov's direct allusions and much of his miscellaneous and obscure game-playing. There is no attempt to interpret "meaning" for the reader; nothing didactic or obtusely academic (indeed, Nabokov would balk too!). It is, however, a fully comprehensive look at Lolita, which is to say the footnotes from page 1 will assume a full knowledge of the entire plot arc. First-time readers who value plot vagaries may want to save the annotations for a second-reading, although I do not recommend it. Lolita has a wonderful plot, but it is a portrait - telegraphed by the incomparable Humbert Humbert, the narrator-as-censored-artist. For most (if not all), the footnotes *make* the novel.

Many of the endnotes are short identifications of references and allusions, but a delightfully large number are paragraphs and even pages long, including comments from Nabokov himself. Indeed, Appel published this "revised and updated" edition after consulting Nabokov himself on his first-edition comments - a rare, rare treat. These astute, authorized, all-encompassing glimpses into a book like Nabokov simply don't happen very often. The Annotated Lolita is a rare treat, and a re-readers *dream. Indulge and enjoy!

It's hard to imagine a better qualified person to annotate Nabokov's Lolita.
Appel has an extensive knowledge of Nabokov's life and work. He met Nabokov, on several occasions, and used those opportunities to find out information that only the author could know.

Appel uses this knowledge to add new, profound and, sometimes just simply amusing insights into a novel that I always admired but also felt frustrated by the mystery shrouding it. To be sure, even after reading Appel's Annotated Lolita enough mystery still remains to keep me intrigued and also to renew my appreciation for Nabokov's amazing mind.

The Annotated Lolita contains a lengthy introduction by Appel that covers other Nabokov's works, his life and his philosophy. The, sometimes dense, annotations are scattered through the text very unobtrusively so that it is quite possible to read the novel with or without Appel's help.

Lermontov is a sleeper by which I mean that he is lesser known and read outside Russia than other immortals. This novel was recommended to me by a Russian friend from Georgia and I was delighted to find a germinal work influenced greatly by Pushkin and Lord Byron. I read Hero of Our Time after Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Both Puskin and Lermontov were mad for Byron's poetry as he had earned a certain rock star status. Pushkin was intrigued by blending poetry into the novel as a literary structure in Eugene Onegin. Lermontov's hero, Pechorin, and Pushkin's Onegin have much in common -- both are lovers named after Russian rivers. They both achieve the character type which became known as the "superfluous man" -- an intellect with charisma who finds his gifts are insufficient to influence his world in the way he has imagined. He becomes an outcast or misfit, in a sense, operating outside the conventions of morality and society -- disdainful of both -- with a clear sense of the futility and absurdity of his life. In Pechorin's case the young soldier chooses to influence his life but does so without hope. Perchorin's superfluous man emerges the underground man of Dostoyevski. This perspective is expressed multifariously in the next century in Camus' Stranger, the characters who in habit Beckett's tragicomedies and in the invisible man of Ralph Ellsion. Perhaps his experience in the Russian military created this sense of despair. His exile to the Caucasus Mountain between the Black and Caspian Seas ultimately had an uplifting affect upon Lermontov from the sheer beauty of the landscape which is memorably described in this novel. Like Pushkin, Lermontov was killed in a duel, in the latter's case at the tender age of 26. Chekhov was said to have remarked, "Still a boy and he wrote that." Lermontov is a must read to understand how the superfluous man personified in Lermontov has so influenced writers of diverse genres who followed him.

Hero of Our Time is Lermontov's autobiographical story and the only complete novel he ever wrote. Lermontov built on what Pushikin started with Onegin (except that Pushkin wrote Onegin in verse) he took a step further and established the ground work for the physiological fiction form which inspired the golden age of nineteenth century Russian literature.

Lermontov exposes the vanity and cynicism as the overriding vice in Russia's nobility to only contrast it with an even darker picture of the state of the Russian serfdom and peasantry. Deeply reflective, Pechorin's search for a purpose is perhaps symbolic to Russia's search for its own identity and purpose.

Although Gregory Aleksandrovic Pechorin's life and deeds constitute the central theme of the story, on a larger historical scale, Hero of Our Time is also a thorough depiction of the Russian presence in, and their understanding of the Caucasus as well as the overall Russian colonialist attitudes of the time. The exotic depiction of Bella, the Chechens and the tribes of the region is somewhat Byronic but probably very real for the author.

A short note: I have read many reviews that claim this to be one of the most prophetic literary works, given that Lermontov foresees his own death! In reality Lermontov plans and publishes his death two years before it actually takes place i.e. there is nothing coincidental, so to speak, about the death of Pechorin and his own death two years after the novel was published in 1841.

An inspiring and dramatic novel that depicts the overwhelming power of the Russian soul as it was in the 19th century.

Having bought this book mainly as something to read while travelling I found it to be not only a wonderful read but a gold mine of information.

The book is not simply a translation of Lermontov's "A hero of our time" But also includes a biography of Lermontov with corresponding time like to historical events and notable poets and writers of the time, a large and detailed introduction to the novel and also well written comprehensive notes to the text which included geographical place names, explanations of words both Russian and Turkish that are used throughout and some commentary on the text.

Not being a native speaker of Russian I am in no position to comment on the quality of the translation but in the introduction to the text the translator comments on some of the poor translations that have come before him and also that some translators have either only partially translated the text or have elaborated on the text believing that by doing so it would become more readable to the English speaking audience. Our translator however, seems to be of the opinion that he is faithful to the original Russian.

The novel itself consists of 5 stories centred around the north Caucuses where Russian troops were stationed while fighting the mountain Circassian and Chechen people in the 19th Century. The novel revolves around a young officer who on arriving meets up with a senior officer who having spent several years in the Caucuses has a fair few stories to tell and begins to narrate one of a young man who fell in love with a young Circassian girl and its tragic end. It seems clear that the senior man has a great deal of admiration for the junior officer and on meeting him again is disappointed at being given the cold shoulder. The younger officer does however, leave behind a collection of his journals that make up the last 3 stories of the novel.

Is is a wonderful short novel evoking the likes of Tolstoy and Pushkin in its tragedy. The main character is something of a reflection of Lermontov himself.

My edition is the everyman classic edition and on checking on amazon US it seems the paperback edition is the only one available in the US. I would however advise buying the everyman edition as it is a hardback and I believe not much more expensive than the paperback.

A note of caution to those considering purchasing the Hard Press edition of "A Hero in Our Time." I bought this edition based on the reviews that mentioned the edition as having been translated by Vlad & Dmitri Nabokov. So I was surprised when I received the Hard Press edition (soft cover, with grayish-green panels on the top and bottom, and grey and white panels in the center; no picture on the cover, only the text of the title/author). NOWHERE in the book does it state that it was translated by Nabokov; indeed, the book contains absolutely no translator info whatsoever, leaving the reader completely at sea in determining who translated it (despite Amazon's description that it contains a "Translator's Foreword"). Instead, the book appears more like a manuscript submitted for review, rather than a publication. There isn't even any Library of Congress or ISBN info anywhere in the book, nor is there a publication date (usually included on one of the opening pages). "Page 1" is completely blank (other than to say it is "Page 1"); "Page 2" consists of a table of contents, and page 3 launches straight into the author's text (despite page 2's table of contents indicating that the book starts with a "Foreward").

Reading this literary whirlwind is somewhat of a harsh inside joke, one that I happen to get and enjoy. He follows some of his motifs and images that he uses in his other novels (the window pencil, cyclical time, etcetera) to make the reader realize that by reading this memoir, the reader has come to know Nabokov less on page 310 than before on page 1! You have to find Nabokov in this book, and those who complain about tediousness and fortress enigmas--those should sigh and let Nabokov set and collect dust on their bookshelf.

I avoid reading autobiographies because so many authors fall on their faces when describing the defining qualities of their lives, in a manner that is interesting to an outsider. Nabokov is an exception: Everything he wrote about felt seemed so close and warm in the memory. He captured both the quintessence of the innocence of youth and the trials of growing up in a turbulent nation. This is one of the only books that I ever read where I was not sated in the end: Just a few more Nabokovian pages of literary richness, please.

As an aside, I loved his description of the "salvo" a chair would make when his zaftig governess (or was it his tutor?) sat down. It forever changed the way I perceive people, myself included, when they sit down. But anyway.

3 starts for "I liked it" --

Thought not the best of the stories I've read (literary-autobiography-wise, nothing I've read surpasses Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles), this charming, rather haphazardly collated collection of Nabokov's autobiographical episodes is certainly worth reading for its breathtaking prose, unique and incisive ruminations on various subjects, and revealing, behind-the-scenes vignettes and thoughts of one of the most fascinating writers of the 20th century.

The only major misgiving I had was the bland, woolgathering reveries I had to trudge through. But then there are these passages that soar into the Unreal and leave me gasping for breath. From the very first sentence ( "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness"), Nabokov proves himself again and again to be the master prose stylist that he was. Just read this description of the moon:

So there it comes, steering out of a flock of small dappled clouds, which it tinges with a vague iridescence; and, as it sails higher, it glazes the runner tracks left on the road, where every sparkling lump of snow is emphasized by a swollen shadow (p.99).

In these instances, I simply must surrender, prostrate, to Nabokov with my humble hat off. I was also pleasantly surprised to find myself laughing over some of the vignettes (esp. in Chapter 6). Take, for example, this one:

One summer afternoon, in 1911, Mademoiselle [my favorite along with Nabokov's father] came into my room, book in hand, started to say she wanted to show me how wittily Rousseau denounced zoology (in favor of botany), and by then was too far gone in the gravitational process of lowering her bulk into an armchair to be stopped by my howl of anguish: on that seat I had happened to leave a glass-lidded cabinet tray with long, lovely series of the Large White. Her first reaction was one of stung vanity: her weight, surely, could not be accused of damaging what in fact it had demolished; her second was to console me: Allons donc, ce ne sont que des papillons de potager! - which only made matters worse. (127)

Funny, incisive, and lyrical, the book is a great read especially if you're a writer. Like some reviewer has written, "time with Nabokov is invariably time well spent." And it is true. He shows us the secret passageways and hidden nooks of the English language that other writers have completely overlooked. Although the book lacks unity and there are episodes I couldn't care less about, it is simply delightful to follow his prose, stumble over obscure charming words, and be surprised, accompanied by that guttural groan of awe and satisfaction at witnessing the magician of words at work.

I read "Speak Memory" over a series of sun-shiny days, sitting in my back yard garden with twenty-six species of flowers blooming around me, in a neighborhood of Victorian houses with 100-year old back yard gardens. My flowers include mallows, zinnias, beebalm, cosmos, snapdragons, and other nectar producers. Over the whole week, I saw just one butterfly, a simple Cabbage White.

I don't think Vladimir Nabokov would write so approvingly of America today as he did of America in the 40s and 50s. I think he'd be disappointed. He'd find it barren and ugly, a casualty of the artless modernism he raged against all his life. Nabokov was a fervid conservative in most things, a man committed to his own memories of a more gracious past, his own childhood in pre-Bolshevik Russia. But don't get the idea that Nabokov was the ultra-capitalist curmudgeonly ranting style of conservative that one hears all too often today; here's what he wrote about that sort of conservative, who "rallied close to my side but did so from such crude reactionary motivation that I was only embarrassed by their despicable support. Indeed, I pride myself with having discerned even then the symptoms of waht is so clear today, when a kind of family circle has gradually formed, linking representatives of all nations, jolly empire builders in the jungle clearings, french policemen, the unmentionable German product, the good old churchgoinf Russian or Polish Pogromshchik, the lean American lyncher, the man with bad teeth who squirts antiminority stories in the bar or the lavatory..."

Like almost everything Nabokov wrote, these memoirs pivot around the Bolshekiv Revolution. Talking about the spiral as a clearer signifier than the circle, he explicitly describes his own life as consisting of a first curl of the spiral, his childhood, ending with his family's flight from the Revolution; a second curl, his twenty years as an emigre in Europe, a grim and self-enclosed time; and his later life in America, a relaxed time of blooming friendships.

More than half the book recaptures the fluttering beauties of his highly privileged and cultured childhood. These chapters are essentially just like the childhood chapters of any memoirist who had a happy youth; they depict his growing self-discovery, his awareness of life in its larval and pupal stages, his acquisition of a sense of having a life cycle to fulfill. "All of this is as it should be according to the theory of recapitulation; the beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time," he meditates, and in another passage, speaking of coincidences and chance encounters, he declares; "The following of such thematic designs through one's life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography." But what distinguishes Nabokov's clearly nostalgic memoirs from those of other writers is the splendor of his language. The moths and butterflies in his display cases are so beautiful and rare that the reader scarcely dares breathe on them. One can read Nabokov's tales of his Tsarist playland for simple verbal pleasure, without much bothering over their significance or reality.

Alas, I find the reality dubious. Tsarist Russia was not that cultured, that gradually progressive, that tolerant and susceptible to self-regeneration. Vlady is mythologizing, friends, painting his lost childhood idyll with acrylics in primary colors! There WERE serfs. There were pogroms, racial barriers and supressions of customs, grinding poverty, and rural neglect tempered only with exploitation. The Bolsheviks were thugs, yes indeed, but they couldn't have triumphed without the mastication of the masses by the upper classes.

The shorter and less lovely chapters of Speak Memory that retell Nabokov's years as an emigre also reveal a kind of display case glass between the author and reality: "As I look back at those years of exile, I see myself, and thousands of other Russians, leading an odd but by no means unpleasant existence, in material indigence and intellectual luxury, among perfectly unimportant strangers, spectral Germans and Frenchmen in whose more or less illusory cities we, emigres, happened to dwell. ...no real communication, of the rich human sort so widespread in our own midst, existed between us and them." Well, well! Having been an emigre myself, on both sides of the Atlantic, I can certainly recognize this state of things. Old Vlad is certainly being honest and implicitly self-derogatory. Once again, however, he mythologizes: following the Bolshevik calamity, he says "With very few exceptions, all liberal-minded creative forces -- poets, novelists, critics, historians, philosophers and so on -- had left Lenin's and Satlin's Russia. Those who had not were either withering away there or adulterating their gifts by complying with the political demands of the state." Thereafter he continues through a full chapter discussing the works of his fellow emigres, all but his own justly forgotten or repudiated by now, while however tenuously and in whatever peril, the writers and composers who stood their ground under Lenin, Stalin, and their troll-hearted successors -- Shostakovich, Prokofieff, Schnittke, Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko, Vosnezhensky, Ahkmatova, Solzhentitsyn, and others -- have bequeathed post-communist Russia a heritage of masterpieces.

What saved Nabokov, I think, was his passage from the pupa stage of an emigre to the winged maturity of being an immigrant. That metamorphosis is not recounted in Speak Memory, which ends cleanly in 1939 with the Nabokov family's departure for America.

Such beautiful language! Such wit! Nabokov is a show-off, no doubt, an exotic hand-sized tropical moth of a writer, the only author whose books ever send me to a dictionary. Hey, that's what I enjoy about him.

In Speak, Memory, Nabokov, who is known for crafting memorable sentences in his novels, attempts to apply his abilities to a story that mirrors all the elegance of the New York telephone directory. And he comes up short.

If you open the book to any page, you are likely to recognize his rich writing style:

"This final dachshund followed us into exile, and as late as 1930, in a suburb of Prague (where my widowed mother spent her last years on a small pension provided by the Czech government), he could still be seen going for reluctant walks with his mistress, waddling far behind in a huff, tremendously old and furious with his long Czech muzzle of wire - an émigré dog in a patched and ill-fitting coat."

But you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Two stars for effort.

Nabokov certainly was fascinated by the affect young women (girls?) had upon older men. This was a theme he experimented with on numerous occasions, most famously with Lolita. Laughter in the Dark, in many ways, is a precursor to Lolita: older man entranced by younger woman, younger woman teasingly toys with older man's emotions, another man mysteriously sweeps younger woman from older man, older man has downfall due to string of consequences. Whereas Lolita played upon the narrator's paranoiac tendencies, sprinkled in a greater dose of humor, and incorporated a mystery more to the reader than to the protaganist, Laughter in the Dark proves to be a more straightforward book, which is not to say that it is any less entertaining. Read alone, it can come across as a moralistic and judgmental fable; incorporated within the Nabakov canon, it can be seen as an enjoyable -- and far too overlooked -- classic.

"Laughter in the Dark" is set in Berlin during the era of the Weimar Republic; it was first published in 1933, the year in which that Republic was replaced by the Nazi regime. (Nabokov himself lived in Germany between 1922 and 1937). Its original Russian title was "Camera Obscura"; this was retained for the first English translation, but then replaced by the present title.

The central character is Albert Albinus, a respected, well-to-do art critic. The plot can be summed up by the novel's opening sentence:-

"Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster."

Albinus becomes obsessed with Margot Peters, a teenage cinema usherette, and leaves his wife Elisabeth and daughter Irma for her. Margot has ambitions to become a film star, and believes that her wealthy lover, who has connections in the world of the arts, can help her. Her only acting venture, however, proves a disaster, and she betrays Albinus with her former lover, Axel Rex, whom she still loves. At first Albinus is unaware of his mistress's betrayal, but eventually realises the truth during a disastrous holiday in Switzerland. Interestingly, the three main characters had different names in the Russian version; Albinus was Bruno Kretzschmar, Margot was Magda, although she still had the surname Peters, and Rex was Robert Gorn or Horn. (The same Cyrillic transcription would be used for both names).

The best part of the book is the final section set in Switzerland. For most of the novel Albinus has been a lovesick fool, blinded (metaphorically) by his passion for Margot. It is only after he is literally blinded, losing his sight in an accident, that he realises the truth about her. As if to emphasise the enormity of Albinus's misfortune, Nabokov concentrates on the beauty of the mountain scenery in passages reminiscent of his previous novel, the superb "Glory", parts of which were also set in Switzerland.

In "Laughter in the Dark" Nabokov deals with a subject, the love of an older man for a young girl, which he was later to make notorious in "Lolita", written more than twenty years later. (He would also deal with this theme in the novella "The Enchanter"). There are, of course, major differences between the two works, the most important possibly being that, whereas Lolita was only twelve when she is first seduced by Humbert (or, possibly, when she first seduces him), her counterpart Margot is sixteen, making "Laughter in the Dark" a much less controversial work.

It is not only less controversial than "Lolita", it is also less complex and more conventional. The later novel is remarkable not only for its subject-matter but also for its complex prose style, a mixture of puns, word-games, literary allusions, recondite words and jokes. The first person narrative allows the author to paint Humbert in his own words. "Laughter in the Dark" is a more straightforward third-person narrative. Nabokov's prose is much less dense and allusive, although he does still allow himself the odd intellectual in-joke, such as when he describes an uncle pretending to be a burglar in order to fool his nieces and nephews as "the Hegelian syllogism of humour".

With the exception of Rex, more credible than the bizarre and enigmatic Quilty, the characters emerge as less interesting than their equivalents in "Lolita". Albinus is a less complex figure than Humbert, who reveals himself as a character both monstrous and pitiful whereas Albinus seems little more than a sex-obsessed dupe. The corrupt and mercenary Margot herself does not engage our sympathies in the way that Lolita does. The story as a whole is, in comparison with "Lolita", a fairly trite one.

Nabokov himself described "Laughter in the Dark" as one of his "worst novels". Although creative artists are not always the best judges of their own work (Tchaikovsky, for example, regularly undervalued what are today regarded as his greatest compositions), and the book undoubtedly has its point of interest, I would certainly agree with him that it is not his best.

"Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster."

Readers interested strictly in the bottom line might well stop there, with the synopsis of the entire story delivered in a single, short paragraph. Readers with the good sense to continue, however, will find themselves basking in the artistry of narration that is Laughter in the Dark . I think that this is among the best of Vladimir Nabokov's novels--which is high praise indeed, considering the oeuvre of this remarkable writer.

Albinus behaves badly, forsaking the wife and daughter who did love him for the gamine of eighteen who did not. Even so, Nabokov's narration makes it difficult not to pity the man in the face of Margot's manipulation and the dreadful treatment dished out by her lover Rex. Albinus understands only when it's too late.

Giving his carnal appetite higher priority than his responsibilities as a husband and father, Albinus supposes that as long as he provides financial support, all will be well (enough) and that he will still maintain his place in respectable society. His failure to see his actions through to their end leaves him vulnerable to disaster and his lust leaves him vulnerable to exploitation. What else but tragedy could follow?

Nabokov's genius is evident in his ability to draw the reader into a story after having given it away in the first paragraph. His prose is almost perfect, a harmonious balance of rhythm and economy: I didn't want to put the book down, though I did force myself to go slowly, to savor the text.

Not a happy story by any means, but one in whose reading there is profit.

This is an extremely well written book, but not one of Nabokov's best -- a little too predictable, the main character unbelievably stupid about his mistress, as if Nabokov enjoys despising him. That can be amusing, but it detracts from the overall story -- hard to maintain that arch tone without boring the reader, even in a short book. Otherwise, somewhat dated and conventional, although told by a master. Pnin was more amusing, and Lolita more compelling. His collected stories is an excellent book.

Just when one has reached the age of relative comfort and has accepted life's compromises with one's youthful and unearthly dreams and yearnings, along comes a great big delusion. In the case of Albinus, the struggle to resist this phantom called beauty didn't last long. He collapsed at its feet, as if it completed him and immortalized him. Utterly blind to its ruthless demands and sad, greedy realities, Albinus let beauty, embodied in the supple Margot Peters, bring down every bit of his integrity until he became, literally, a pathetic, helpless supplicant at her feet. This theme has recently been reprised in the award-winning movie, "American Beauty."

What I find interesting in this classically simple and beautifully executed novel is the underlying theme of our relationship to art and beauty. Does beauty make fools of us all, even the most intelligent among us who, one would think, should know better? Or are those people the most vulnerable of all, as they see all the way to the depths of beauty and art and lose themselves in their mystery? In contrast, hardened cynics and inherently nasty people, as epitomized in the character Axel Rex, take their due of life's sweets and laugh at the foolishness of those mere mortals who somehow try to capture and control them. They are nothing to be preserved, but are merely wild and fleeting, like a summer day or a rare butterfly fluttering through the dahlias. Yet it is all too human to quake and tremble and collapse when sensual delight finds its way into one's life. This is the story of such a disaster and the evil it releases.

Let's also leave "Lolita" on the shelf when reading this work. This one came first. It should be appreciated in its own right. Comparisons are for literature professors. Discrete enjoyment is for readers.

Evil in people is almost always mixed in with some good. How often do we hear about a "good neighbor" who surprised everyone with some atrocity? The challenge of the book for me is to figure out what to feel about the "good" Dr. Jekyll, who splits out into the heinous Mr. Hyde.
The introduction by Nabokov is brilliant, and is illuminating for anyone interested in how Nabokov viewed the problem of human evil and how he constracted his own seemingly morally ambiguous novels.

I loved this book. The version I read had the Nabokov part in the beginning. It'd be best for anyone who's going to read Nabokov's part to read it AFTER you've read the story by R.L. Stevenson. Elsewise you'll ruin the story for yourself cuz Nabokov just breaks it down by taking excerpts of the already short novel and placing them in front of your eyes and imaginations BEFORE you've ever even read the featured story! Hopefully this version will one day put Vladymir in the back!

This book was a MAJOR DISSAPOINTMENT. I would strongly advise AGAINST reading it. I thought it would be suspensful, or at least interesting, but sadly it was just a bad book.

The story holds no suspense--the explaination of Dr.Jekyll's antics is handed to you on a silver platter--no mystery, no surprise, just boredom. The author, in the beginning, gets the reader interested, but the ultimate piece in the whole mysterious puzzle is downright stupid.

The language was annoying, too. I respect that the book was written many years ago, but the way the characters rambled ON AND ON and never got to the point was downright obnoxious. I only read the book because I needed to for school. It was almost torture to read the constant whining and complaining of Dr. Jekyll, which, by the way, went on for 13 pages straight.

I was totally let down by the simplicity and stupidity of the book. A classic shmassic. It was a horrible, badly written book with a flimsy plot line. To any person who wants to read it simply because it's famous, they're in for a real shocker. And if anyone says it's a good book, three words: big fat lie.

The classic tale of Dr. Jekyll struggling with his inner demon, Mr. Hyde. The story is told mainly from the point of view of Mr. Utterson, the lawyer of Dr. Jekyll, who is trying to find out who Mr. Hyde is.

This is a great book, one of those classics that everyone should read at least once. Stevenson gives great descriptions of the battle between Jekyll and Hyde. I highly recommend it.

The book I read is about a man named Dr. Henry Jekyll. He is a wealthy man who lives in London around 1885. He was making some experiments on him self by taking drugs and turning into another person. He named this person he changed into Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll was living with two different personalities. He was living this character so often that he wrote a will leaving all his belongings to his other character in case he shifts to the other personality permanently. This confused his friends. A lawyer named Mr. Utterson who started investigating about the mystery of the will because Dr. Jekyll did not introduce him to this unknown character. First, Mr. Utterson discussed Dr. Jekyll's character with Mr. Enfield. Mr. Enfield told him about a man who had tripped over a little girl without realizing what he did just stood there silently with out any reaction for how he had tripped over the girl, while people gathered around to help the crying girl, the girl's father came shouting for the police. The strange man finally spoke asking them not to call the police offering a 100 pounds. They accepted the offer and went with him to a house where he brought out a Checkbook in the name of Dr. Jekyll and signed as Mr. Hyde. Mr. Enfield took Mr. Utterson and showed him the door to that house. Dr. Jekyll never mentioned Mr. Hyde's name to him. He then went to visit Dr. Lanyon, a very close friend of Dr. Jekyll, to ask him about "Mr. Hyde." Dr. Lanyon knew Dr. Jekyll but he had no idea about Edward Hyde. Mr. Utterson kept watching the back door at night, finally at the third night he saw a little man wearing large clothes at the door. He stepped up to him and called him Mr. Hyde. The man answered back "how do you know me." Mr. Utterson told him that Dr. Jekyll informed him about him because he is his lawyer. The man ignored Utterson and quickly unlocked the door, walked in and shut the door behind him. Mr. Utterson went to Dr. Jekyll's house and asked his servant, Poole, if Dr. Jekyll was in the house or not. Poole said that he was out. Then he asked him if he knows a Mr. Hyde and the servant answered that he is a friend of Dr. Jekyll however he had never met him because he usually comes in through the back door of the laboratory.
In conclusion, Mr. Utterson's search for the identity of Mr. Hyde was still not going well. He investigated with all the mutual friends. He found through the letters send to him and the rest of the friends that Dr. Jekyll was involved in a serious experiment to control the evil part of his mind. Unfortunately he was too late to save his dear friend Dr. Jekyll from his tragic end.

This account of the relationship between the Nabokov's was a superb treasuer. No wonder it won the Pullitzer. The depth of the relationship between these two intellectuals was refreshing. Both people were very complex and loved each other deeply. Vera was everything to him and she was completely devoted to him and was always there for him through good and bad times. They were true soul mates.

Other writers have elaborated at length on the quality of the contents of VERA, so I'll refrain from that. I will note - and base my own recommendation on two qualities well-investigated by Schiff, and which I loved: this is a remarkable love story, between two of the 20th century's great intellectuals, and the glimpse into not one but two creative minds at work is priceless.

And Schiff does great justice to the everyday details of this collaborative relationship, with day-to-day qualities other writers would take for granted made compelling.

Perhaps a book for Nabokov's fans, but a great one for sure.

-David Alston

Since you are inviting me to submit a review of the book that you have not yet shipped to me, I hope this note will help you to revise -- and improve -- your business procedures. My rating, therefore, applies to the latter, not the book itself; I would've let the rating field empty had the system let me do so.
Yours,
BGV

Vera Nabakov was totally devoted to her husband, to his life and to his work. Stacy Schiff's excellent biography tells their story in considerable detail. Vera Slonim the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family in marrying Nabakov made her religion his life and his art. She took upon herself many of the practical tasks that Nabakov disdained. They developed between themselves a private language in which they shared their own unique synashaetic way of feeling the world. She typed and read his manuscripts, found quotations for him helped him create one of the twentieth century's great literary oeuvres.

it was a very good biography, but if you read the Boyd bio of her husband first you may be left wondering if he had already snatched up all the good quotes.

Ask me any questions you may not have, friends. By mounting the reviewer's scaffold, I've sentenced myself to reply on behalf of the author, who is otherwise disposed. What's this book about, you ask? Why, the same thing all books are about, you and me. But what happens in it? That's an impertinent question! Why should my author be troubled to say what his book is about when you can read it for yourself. Humble apologies then, but is there a setting? Oh, there may or may not be a setting, or more precisely, a sitting, in a cell in a castle across a river from a town of exceptional ordinariness, but the cell shows all the hallmarks of quantum measurability. And characters? Yes, yes, one or more. A certain Cincinnatus, who bears a close resemblance to Schroedinger's cat, is encapsulated in his cells, as we all are, awaiting his death by beheading for the crime of gnostical turpitude, of which he would no doubt be guilty if he knew what it meant. His guard, the guard's small daughter, his lawyer, the warden, his wife and in-laws, his mother whom he doesn't know, and his executioner-to-be, an outlandish primo donno, all pop in and out of his cellular anomie like punch-and-judy puppets operated by sadistic voyeurs. Is the whole tale a fabulation in Cincinnatus's mind? No, of course not. Cincinnatus is a fabulation in the author's mind. Try to ask more sensible questions, please! Is this a fable of life in the dungeons of communism? That's enough! I can't continue to evade your questions on behalf of Mr. Nabokov if you don't frame them in surreal terms!

People have said about music that it is the most expressive of arts but that it's impossible to say precisely what it expresses. Nabokov's early writings - Invitation to a Beheading was written in Russian and published in Paris in 1938 - were immediately compared to the works of Franz Kafka, and although Nabokov disputes the association, I should think most readers would accept it. A determined reader could demand an either/or of this Beheading: either the whole thing is a `morbid' fantasy in the mind of a neurasthenic fellow whose name may be Cincinnatus, or the `real' Cincinnatus is absorbed in fretful day dreams which are brought to a final page only with his actual death. I prefer to dodge either/or questions, being a musician, and to suggest that Invitation to a Beheading is music, and therefore means whatever I think it means. You, dear reader, are welcome to share my musical appreciation.

Here's how Nabokov describes Cincinnatus's departure from his cell en route to the scaffold: Cincinnatus, who, alas, had suddenly lost the capacity of walking, was supported by M'sieur Pierre [the executioner] and a soldier with the face of a borzoi. For a very long time they clambered up and down staircases - the fortress must have suffered a mild stroke, as the descending stairs were in reality ascending and vice versa. Again there were long corridors, but of a more inhabited kind; that is, they visibly demonstrated - either by linoleum, or by wallpaper, or by a sea chest against the wall - that they adjoined living quarters. At one bend there was even a smell of cabbage soup. Further on they passed a glass door with the inscription "ffice," and after another period of darkness they abruptly found themselves in the courtyard, vibrant with the noonday sun.

Now then, dear amazonian book shoppers, you'll have to join the throng of townspeople hastening toward the place of execution in order to sop up the sanguinary verbiage at the foot of the scaffold.

Most of the enjoyment with this book is the discovery of Nabokov's creation. Frankly, I suggest that you skip the reviews here, close your eyes for the moment and simply read the book - the same recommendation that I make for most of his books. Read the comments later.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899 to 1977) is a Russian born writer who went to Cambridge, lived in western Europe, then in the US, and finally retired to Switzerland. He has a medium sized body of work with numerous novels, short works, and his non-fiction. Most know him for his 1955 creation of Lolita, which he wrote and re-wrote for over twenty years before the final product. It was based on a real life French story, but set in America. He has 20 novels.

Eleven of Nabokov's novels come from his early European period when he could write in many languages but he wrote his first 11 novels all in Russian. This is one of those, one of his last novels, and it was published in 1938 as a book.

The book is not about an invitation to a beheading as much as it is about a man on death row. Without giving away the plot, it describes in a very fanciful and unrealistic way, but in a creative fashion as Nabokov can do, the life a prisoner on death row and the people who come to visit.

The man is in a jail or in the fortress which is the jail in a small French town. His name is Cincinnatus. We are never told what crime he has commited. He is visited by his lawyer, the jailer, the jail supervisor, his family, etc. To say much more would be to give away the story.

As with some of his other novels, it is part reality and part mental images or dreams. It is left to the reader to sort out which is which.

I think it is good; it is interesting; but not his best work.

I only came to know of this early Nabokov novel by reading the wonderful "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi (highly recommended), a study of the relevance of literature in the personal quest for freedom from the crushing weight of oppression. Certainly the protagonist of "Invitation to a Beheading," Cincinnatus C., is a relevant case in point, given that he has been sentenced to death for an obscure crime (gnostical turpitude)and is constantly under the manipulatory pressures of absurd agents of the state. In this he is not at all unlike Nafisi and all the other victims of Khomeini's revolutionary guards who interpret the crimes as they go along. Others may find some parallels in modern America.
Many have compared this Nabokov (written in 1935) to Franz Kafka, but the wellspring is really more deeply rooted in the existential guilt that plagues the modern psyche. In earlier times, all shared in the social code of justice and understood the right and wrong, whether or not they agreed with it; but in the 20th century, there emerged a certain arbitrainess of authority that made potential criminals of all somewhere inside their minds. I think of the French author Celine in this context, as well as an unpublished novel of my own written almost 40 years ago.
So it is easy to see how Nafisi could apply the parallels to her situation in Tehran, forced to veil, forced to accept, unable to flee, to the situation of Cincinnatus C. I think that anyone who has lived an even mildly contemplative life can feel the constriction that such or any arbitrary authority causes.
But what I really want to say about "Invitation to a Beheading" is a bit more personal in nature. Have you ever awoken from a complex dream and thought, "I wish I could write this down, it's really a good story"? No one I have ever read, including Joyce, has done as well at capturing a dream state as Nabokov does in the early pages of "Invitation." And, as if to prove it is not a fluke or a lucky break, he comes back to it again and again, right up until the powerful closing scene.
"Invitation to a Beheading" is a powerful dream that too many of us have had, deep in our own gnostical turpitude. It is almost miraculous that one could capture it so well, especially one such as Nabokov whom we know for his open-eyed precision in the later works. But miraculous or not, our heightened ability to relate to it does not say good things about where we have come in the early days of the 21st century.

Invitation to a Beheading is a short novel written during Nabokov's prolific Berlin phase in his late 20s and 30s, (if you have only read Nabokov's more famous later works, written in English, such as Lolita, Ada and Pale Fire then I urge you to pick up his emigre period novels, all of them available in translation). It is not one of his greatest works, but it is a compelling tale of the last 19 days of Cincinattus, a mild mannered non conformist who is imprisoned in bizzarre and surreal circumstances (his crime: gnostical turpitude) and spends his final days leading up to his execution, the date of which he is not told despite his repeated exhortions to his jailers.

The story is a touching piece of dystopian literature (a genre I confess to not being overly familiar with, I have read The Trial by Kafka, but not 1984 by Orwell - a shocking solecism I know, I vow to rectify it soon). Cincinattus is tormented by his captors who eat his food, use his cell as an office and play games which Cincinattus has to muster all of his remaning dignity to avoid falling into. The most tender scenes are those where he writes - a doomed literature, much like the censored writers struggling under Stalinism, who knows his work will never be read. He writes, to preserve something of himself, to avoid his essence vanishing alltogether: 'I am trembling over the paper, chewing the pencil through to the lead, hunching over to conceal myself from the door through which a piercing eye stings me in the nape.'

Those little stylistic bursts of pure writing talent are the main reason I read Nabokov. For me he is the greatest stylist of 20th Century Literature. Only Nabokov could produce a sentence like the following, the final sentence of chapter 7, when Cincinattus's reading has been interrupted by the bullying guards, who have snatched a vase of peonies, splashing water: 'Cincinnatus kept staring into the book. A drop had fallen onto the page. Through the drop several letters turned from brevier to pica, having swollen as if a reading glass were lying over them.'

Joyce, Updike et all, would kill to be able to write prose that beautiful.

"Invitation" gives you a glimpse at the ghosts of Nabokov future. It shows off his love of little turns of phrase; eventually his style became more abstract, and the words themselves -- rather than the images they represented -- the center of attention. It also contains the barest outlines of his future cynicism toward reviewers, other writers, and even his reader. (Indeed, I'm never sure whether he likes anyone. I suspect he's the perfect misanthrope.)

This book, though, is not nearly as captivating as his later works. It only inspires me to go to the opposite end of his career and read "Ada, or Ardor." Those who've not experienced Nabokov would do well to read "Lolita," which despite its fame as some kind of highbrow erotica is not even vaguely so; indeed, the Vintage edition comes with Nabokov's (as always, astringent) response to those who think it pornographic. You could also try his autobiography "Speak, Memory," but it's always felt like Nabokov's flights of imagery were getting too self-satisfied in that book: yes, Nabokov, we know you're a stylist; now say something.

After "Lolita," I'd recommend "Pale Fire." It's Nabokov as his best and worst: stylistic fun, a maddeningly elusive story, and the sense that you're the victim of a very long joke.

As with all the Nabokov I've read, "Invitation to a Beheading" is worth reading. It's just that some of his books are more worth reading than others. In a life with finite time, I don't think one has time for "Invitation to a Beheading."

This book is really hard to get into, but once you push yourself, you'll really get into it. Nabokov is an amazing writer. Every character is just an exploration into the depths of language. Also, he really gets into the mindset of his characters. Thats why the writing in this book seems a little cold, a little distant...
So if you are up for something different, I would recommend this book.

This story is about a person who looks/acts relatively "normal", but who's inner desperation leads him to hallucinate--and act on these delusions--in order to see the things that he wants to see. Unfortunately, the world doesn't cooperate. I liked "Despair" because it enabled me to witness an experience from a deranged perspective, but again, it isn't one of my favorite Nabokov stories. It was kind of short, so that might have something to do w/ it.

as vlad puts it: "hermann and humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble each other. both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in paradise where humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but hell shall never parole hermann."

both are self-obsessed, manipulative, solipsistic sociopaths...initially they charm readers with their wit and meticulous deconstruction of their surroundings...and by then end they have you laughing wildly...pitying them even, as if they simply cannot help the fact that they feel emotion for nothing other than themselves...like a person with cretinism. it isn't their fault, simply a flaw in their makeup.

combine arrogance and intelligence with self-obsession and an emotional black hole in place of a heart...and you get a brilliantly entertaining comedy. but the character in despair is hardly worthy of contempt. he is a jester and a mastermind...as is nabokov himself.

With deliberate reference to Dostoyevsky, and sideways glances at Poe and Kafka, Nabokov's *Despair* takes on the classic literary theme of `the double' with gruesome, and often hilarious, results. Hermann, a failed businessman and aspiring writer, relates his story of one day coming by chance upon a tramp in the woods who bears a striking resemblance to himself. Alternatively repulsed, fascinated, and obsessed by his `twin,' he concocts a plan to commit the perfect murder...the criminal equivalent of the perfect novel.

Nabokov draws out the metaphor between murder and art all the way to the eerie conclusion of *Despair* and his self-conscious narrator is the perfect mouthpiece for expounding the central theme: the art of crime and the crime of art. Vain, egotistical, insecure, capricious...Hermann is the quintessential unreliable narrator, a self-admitted liar from childhood who lies simply for the pure creative joy of it. An artist, in other words...and, in this case, an author. Hermann creates fictions and his murder plot will be his `masterpiece,' except there are always a few flaws in any masterpiece and critics aplenty to point them out. In the case of murder, the critics are the police and a bad review means arrest, imprisonment, and possibly a death sentence.

*Despair,* in spite of its title, is a lot of fun, poking fun as it does at the conventions of the novel even as it exploits each and every one of them. In a sense, it's a book about writing as much, if not more than, the murder that is actually being written about. Nabokov thus adroitly turns an otherwise relatively conventional crime story into an existential commentary on the absurdity of the human condition and the ultimate failure of the artist to apprehend an entirely satisfactory expression of this absurdity. The question is: Can an artist get away with murder? Is any crime ((art)) perfect?

Whether as an extended and metaphoric meditation on art and personal identity or as a nifty, twisted tale of a mind unraveling into psychosis and murder, *Despair* is an impeccably written, entertaining, and intelligent novel by one of the 20th century's greatest writers.

Despair is probably not the first novel that comes to mind when thinking about Nabokov and his works and it may not even be among the top ten. But it is a Nabokov novel and that all by itself makes it worthy of our attention. Typically, it is a delight.

Nabokov's forward tells us that it was originally written in Russian while he was living in Berlin in 1934. There was an early, clumsy translation to English; then, in 1965, the final one. Nabokov describes it this way: "The ecstatic love of a young writer for the old writer he will be some day is ambition in its purest form. The love is not reciprocated by the older man in his larger library, for even if he does recall with regret a naked palate and a rheumless eye, he has nothing but an impatient shrug for the bungling apprentice of his youth." The novel hasn't even started yet and already the reader finds a big grin crossing his face.

It is written in the first person by a German businessman, who, while walking in an unpopulated area one day, comes across a hobo who, to his surprise, looks exactly like him. The plot has to do with a scheme our narrator concocts then implements to use this unusual resemblance for his own unscrupulous monetary gain. It would not be prudent to give away more. Though it is a rather familiar formula, let's just say that it is nevertheless very intriguing but ultimately logical in its surprisingly unsurprising denouement.

As usual with the Nabokov novel there is a lot more going on than initially meets the eye. Our narrator, fascinated by his scheme and by his own perceived cleverness, views his plan as a work of art. He comments that all art and great art especially is based on deception. How hilarious it is to discover that his scheme ends in such a banal, predictable way and how clever that Nabokov seems to be poking a little fun at his own pretensions.

No review of a Nabokov work would be complete without quoting at least a couple of passages as his use of the language is so exquisite. Here is our narrator describing the unpleasant landscape immediately prior to his fateful meeting with his doppelganger: "One could not leave the steps of the path, for it dug very deep into the incline; and on either side tree roots and scrags of rotting moss stuck out of its earthen walls like the broken springs of decrepit furniture in a house where a madman had dreadfully died." Wrenching, and structurally, the astute reader might also wonder whether it contains an element of foreshadowing.

Here is a delightful aside: "Germans got their due [losing World War I] for that sealed train in which Bolshevism was tinned, and Lenin imported to Russia."

A final example, after posting a letter that would put his plan into inexorable motion: "I felt what probably a purple red-veined thick maple leaf feels, during its slow flutter from branch to brook."

It's Nabokov. What else is there to say?

I am unabashedly a lover of Nabokov, with "Lolita" being my all time favorite. It is a book I can dip into at any moment, reading random passages as if reading it anew. The prose is luscious and dense, the characterizations tender and light, the plotting as complex as Humbert himself.

I can rattle off passages with nary a ripple of hestitation. The prose is deliciously poetic and that is my favorite to read.

Many have derided the novel as purient but I see it as a study in desire, in all its many forms. Desire for connection, for understanding, for absolution, for the dreams of the past.

The most beautiful moment is Humbert listening to children play and realizing that the tragedy of life was not the absence of Lolita by his side but the absence of her voice from the childrens' play. Read the book and you'll see what an amazing character transformation this really is.

I cannot recommend it more.

Lolita tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a middle aged English gent who boards at a home in New England with a widow and her 12 year old daughter Dolores. Humbert is no ordinary middle aged man - for he has a fixation with young girls that he calls "nymphets" or "nymphs" - young girls of a certain disposition who reveal themselves to "bewitched travellers" such as himself. Humbert marries the widow and he quickly plots to murder her so that he can have young Dolores all to himself - unfortunately he doesn't have it in him to carry things through. However, after a rather bizarre accident, his wife dies and Humbert takes Dolores/Dolly/Lolita/Lo on a roadtrip and begins a sexual relationship with her.

There are no explicit obscenities. There is no bad language. There is no voyeuristic porn. Yet this is undoubtedly a story told by a manipulative sexual predator about the cruel exploitation of his 12 year old stepdaughter. To complicate things, Lolita is (at least some of the time) a willing participant. Humbert narrates his story with some of the most beautiful language you are ever likely to come across ("you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style") - but there is no getting away from the fact that Humbert rapes his young stepdaughter time and time again. The fact that he luxuriates in his own depravity while simultaneously acknowledging his own moral failures serves to make his character all the more complicated.

A 20th century classic that I have only now gotten around to reading. Controversial, haunting and somehow strangely compelling. Highly recommended.

Great book. Many are drawn to it because of its forbidden and erotic nature. But once you begin reading it you become trapped in Nabokov's tale of love and obsession and can't let go. It is a literary masterpiece. Reading Lolita is something beyond being witness to what happens in the story as an outsider. The reader is eventually a part of the tale and it becomes a test of one's own morality.

Maybe Lolita should come in a plain brown jacket given how much controversy this novel has generated over the years. Yet, it remains at the top of most critics' lists of the best books of the 20th century because the story remains as fresh as ever. While most people choose to remember little Lo, it is through the twisted mind of Humbert Humbert that we got to know this mischievous nymphet who repeatedly roused the lustful protagonist to the point of ecstasy only to foil him at almost every turn. There are countless interpretations of this novel, and Nabokov chose to remain coy about his subject matter, providing a third person foreward and a short afterward. One can gain more insight reading the Annotated Lolita by Alfred Appel, but why spoil the fun! Indulge in these carnal delights as Nabokov takes the reader on a wild ride across America, not once but twice, as Humbert revels in his lust for Lolita. However, the real thrill comes from Nabokov's rich language, the clever plot twists, and the way he cunningly pries into our subconscious, making us all complicit in Humbert's crimes of passion.

Lolita was one of those books in which I looked forward to reading for a long time. However, much to my regret I was disappointed.

The author is obviously highly talented and his word play is often nothing short of gorgeous. The narrative is at first, highly amusing and interesting and even touching at certain points.
In fact, I was quite enchanted by the first chapter in which Humbert describes his relationship with Anabelle. Also, the early passages of Lolita herself are quite wonderful. The problems arise when Humbert finally gets what he has always dreamed about.

The error lies in the fact that the book seems to be nothing but descriptions, and I often found myself drifting away and having to search for an actual action to have occured. Rather then putting in as much word play as possible, actual structure would allow the reader to appreciate what is described. And fascinating as it read an outsider's view of America on the road, when it goes on for several pages it becomes very tired.
The main character himself begins to become a one trick pony and I became bored with his endless rambling and self pity. Mind you I do not expect to fall in love with a molestor but I can only handle so much of his whining.

All in all, in excerpts of any part of Lolita is gorgeous. However when it is all meshed together it becomes tiresome and a chore.

I bought this book hoping to find great insights into the work of my favorite Russian authors. In particular I had just finished Anna Karenina. I am huge fan of Nabokov. I adore many of his books. Pale Fire and Lolita are two of my favorite novels ever, but this collection of his lectures was fairly disappointing. It was thin on insight (there were a few) and long on retelling of the the plots. It's almost like a Nabokov cliff notes. Not what I was hoping for.

Nabokov writes about literature the way some write about wine: savoring nuances and discussing it with delight. A writer of elegant books and a scientist devoted to meticulous classification of detail, he could match Robert Parker's ability to rate 10,000 wines a year with his capacity of analyzing literary works. His illuminating writing is itself full of light and spark and makes his "Lectures on Literature" an esthetic experience.

In Nabokov's world, art fully defines a literary work. Here writer is an "enchanter" and a story teller, rather than historian, philosopher or instructor in any practical matter. His lectures are devoted to detecting the elements of style and structure in some of the most remarkable novels of European Literature.

One of these elements is symphony. Nabokov once confessed that he never found much pleasure in music. If we imagine for a second that he did, he probably would have preferred symphonies to chamber music and big band to jazz trio. He delighted in complex structures, where multiple parts fit neatly together: symphony of people in Flaubert's agriculture scene in "Madame Bovary", where "all the characters of ... book intermingled in action and in dialogue", symphony of simultaneous events in "Ulysses", symphony of senses in Proust's pairing of the visual and musical effects of moon light in "The Walk by Swann's Place", which he considered more complete and elegant than moon light's description in Gogol's "Dead Souls" where only visual perception is called to work.

Many other elements of personal style are noted: Dickensian imagery and word play, Proust's evolving sentences where A leads to B leads to C, the theme of layers in "Madame Bovary", variation of style in "Ulysses".

Nabokov's method of detecting these elements is to pay special attention to detail. The natural scientist in him believes that any general conclusion would develop naturally after the facts have been collected and taken in. Nabokov expected his students to draw street maps and family trees, visualize hairdos and notice the exact way one catches a coin tossed in the air.

Having answered the how of reading literature, Nabokov considers the why. The answer he offers is to acquire a taste for it. He believes that seeing the novel through its author's eyes, rising to the level of "the joys and difficulties of creation" is one of the most intense pleasures, and shares this pleasure with his students.

Nabokov is a native of world literature. So it is no surprise that as he is taking the reader on a guided tour of his land, his strong literary opinions easily navigate centuries and continents of literary landscape. However, being an emotional as well as scholarly narrator, Nabokov naturally gravitates to his favorite corners of the world. He is a guide giving a tour of his native city and adding more intimate detail and color when talking about the streets where he grew up. Russian literature must occupy a very special place in his heart, since it permeated his Russian childhood, his longing for which he so beautifully described in "Speak, Memory". In "Lectures on Russian Literature", Nabokov is noticeably closer to the Russian writers than he is to the European writers in his previous volume, "Lectures on Literature" (itself very enjoyable). His spectrum of vision is wider, embracing multiple works of a writer and his personal qualities. The resulting picture is richer, the contrasts of the temperaments and styles make the writers stand out: Chekhov's altruism and Turgenev's vanity, Gogol's impressionist colors and Gorky's clichés, Dostoevsky's cold reason overwhelming his art and Tolstoy's "mighty" art "transcending the sermon", the believable and coherent worlds of Chekhov or Tolstoy and Dostoevsky's internally contradicting world or Gorky's "schematic characters and the mechanical structure of the story"...

Here Nabokov continues his thought that a writer is mostly a creative artist, rather than a historian or philosopher. This is how he summarized Gogol's desperate attempts to collect facts for the second part of "Dead Souls": "[Gogol] was in the worst plight that a writer can be in: he had lost the gift of imagining facts and believed that facts may exist by themselves" (Gogol was asking his friends to supply him with descriptions of life around them which he could use in his art). Contrast with it Nabokov's admiration of Chekhov's writing for being so true to life. Chekhov invented his characters, but did it so well that they naturally created a coherent world. Nabokov always put imagination and style at the top of the writer's arsenal, and much above any "reality" (which he always mentioned in quotation marks).

Nabokov clearly prefers characters to reveal themselves rather than be explained by the author: for example, where Chekhov let his characters act (not surprisingly, Chekhov was a great playwright), Turgenev tended to over-explain. In "Fathers and Sons", he uses epilogue to describe what happened next in the story. In the scene where Bazarov's father embraces his wife "harder than ever", Turgenev feels the need to explain that this happened because "she had consoled him in his grief". For the same reason Dostoevsky, whose characters Nabokov sees as "mainly ideas in the likeness of people", was not one of his favorite authors. Primacy of idea over form and style was anathema to Nabokov. Both Turgenev and Dostoevsky were too visible on the page for his taste.

Personal style of a writer enjoys a special consideration throughout these lectures. While Chekhov is presented as a master of light touch, of suggestion, Dostoevsky appears repetitive, dogmatic, hurried and over-working. As an illustration, Nabokov points out that to set up the murder in "Crime and Punishment" the author needed a whole confluence of circumstances: "Raskolnikov's poverty, self-sacrifice of his sister and utter moral debasement of the intended victim".

Nabokov believes that literature should not be gulped, but "taken and broken into bits, pulled apart, squashed", gradually releasing its flavors. One could hear a master chef admiring the virtues of spice freshly crushed in a mortar. His obvious delight in attending to the minute flavors of the novel makes his lectures so enjoyable and unique.

Imagine you attend Cornell, you smart devil you. You wander into the Lit class and a hawk-browed very serious tall man with glinting eyes leans out at you over the faded wooden podium. Behind him on the blackboard are a maze of drawings, dates, crisscrossing lines and circles. You look again at your syllabus - Russian Literature in translation. The black bell above the door rings, the tired muted clatter of a halting iron clanger. A rustle of books, restless students, and dead air from the closed winter storm windows rises up for just a second, then, hovering in the room shrinks to silence. The teacher begins,
"Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. Leaving aside his percursors Pushkin and Lermentov, we might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy; second, Gogol; third, Checkov; fourth, Turgenev. This is rather like grading student's papers and no doubt Dostoevski and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks."
So begin the lectures on Anna Karenina. By the time Nabokov is done you will know more than you thought possible about the novel. You'll be comfortably familiar with the inside of an 1872 Russian railroad passenger car traveling as the night express between Moscow and St. Peterburg. To help you picture it, Nabokov draws a highly detailed sketch, with the position of each occupant, doors, windows, stove; even the direction of travel is rememebered.
Wonderful as all this is, for sheer incandescent brilliance, no essay on any work in Russian Literature by any critic comes close to Nabokov's examination of Gogol's Dead Souls. Unlike Nabokov's own listing of Russian prose masters, he also comes in second as well as first, with the fulsomely captivating essay on Anna Karenina. The others offer a cross between a kaleidoscope's rendering of the fantasy behind the dummy facades with the exactitude born out of years of scientific reading.
Nabokov's particular and unique genius treats us with a plethora of acute and uncanny observations, viewpoints derived from the closest possible scrutiny of the works. No book compares in this field - a marvel!

Some time back, I reviewed "Crime and Punishment" for Amazon. One of the commentators on my review suggested that I take a look at Vladimir Nabokov's critical analysis of Dostoevsky. So, via Amazon, I purchased Vladimir Nabokov's book, "Lectures in Literature." As luck would have it, this was not the volume covering Dostoevsky! However, I did take a look anyhow, my curiosity piqued by the comment on my review. The end result? A greater appreciation for Nabokov--and also a sense that I'm not apt to invest a great deal of time reading other of his literary analysis.

The essays in this book represent lectures that he gave at Wellesley College and Cornell University. The introductory comments note that (Page ix): "The fact cannot and need not be disguised that the texts for these essays represent Vladimir Nabokov's written-out notes for delivery as classroom lectures and that they cannot be recognized as a finished literary work. . . ." John Updike's Introduction also provides some context for this work. He notes that Nabokov's lectures provide (Page xxv): ". . .a dazzling demonstration, for those lucky Cornell students in the remote, clean-cut fifties, of the irresistible artistic sensibility." He also notes, in Nabokov's words, the truth of novels, that (Pages xxv-xxvi): ". . .great novels are great fairy tales--and the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales. . . ." Nabokov himself points out that a writer can be considered as (a) a storyteller, (b) a teacher, and (c) an enchanter (Page 5). And, above all, he values style and structure in authors' creations.

Maybe a few examples will illustrate his critical approach. First, Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park." Let me confess. . . . I'm not particularly excited about Jane Austen's work. However, Nabokov is very pleased with her work. Given his emphasis on style and structure, he details how well she constructs this work. For instance, at one point, the characters, among whom there are a variety of tensions to begin with, select a play to perform. The decision as to which of the characters in Austen's story would play which characters in the play is well discussed by Nabokov. The play itself raises questions--it was, in fact, an actual play that scandalized some of the characters in the novel. And it exacerbated pre-existing tensions among the characters. All in all, Nabokov makes a great case that Austen's structure of this segment of the novel was well done indeed. And, in terms of style, he says of Austen that (Page 59) "she handles it with perfection." As noted, I am not much excited by Austen's works, but Nabokov sure convinced me that she was a terrific technical writer, who wed her genius to technique and style and structure to create something special.

Briefly, I would also note that his examination of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" leaves him cold. He does not think that it holds together well and that the dichotomy of the characters works well.

Finally, Kafka's "Metamorphosis," a story I read several decades ago. I recall the sense of despair I felt reading about the travails of Gregor Samsa--and a sense that, despite the awful/offal nature of the work that there was something important here. Nabokov is very positive about this piece. Much of this lecture is a simple description of the work, scene by scene, and Nabokov spennds some time noting how Kafka's work is so much better than Stevenson's work discussed above. Samsa's unexplained transformation into a beetle is the event that triggers this story. Nabokov notes how this tragedy has positive elements--a family finally getting its act together even as it abandons Gregor--and illustrates Kafka's style. Of the latter, Nabokov says (Page 283): "You will mark Kafka's style. Its clarity, its precise and formal intonation in such striking contrast to the nightmare matter of his story."

He concludes this set of lectures by congratulating his students on their work--and making a few final points. He concludes (Pages 381-382): "I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotion of the people in the book but the emotions of its author--the joys and difficulties of creation."

I admire his emphasis on style and structure, but I also think there is an almost sanitary quality about some of his observations. Austen? I have found it difficult over decades to get any purchase on her works. Her style and structure doesn't make up for what I feel as an overly mannered style (I expect to get hammered for saying that!). Does one really need to know about her knowledge of a particular play to appreciate (or not appreciate) her novel? I don't know. I'm a political scientist--not a literary critic. Nonetheless, this is an exciting book, as one learns how a literary critic from one critical perspective examining a series of works--Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, Stevenson, Proust, Kafka, and Joyce. If interested in Nabokov's critical perspective, this is a good starting point!