Vladimir Nabokov

The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, Pale Fire, is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should. Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterwork is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.

Vladimir Nabokov's earliest major work, written when he was twenty-four, is a full-length play in verse of Shakespearean beauty and richness. The story of an incognito king whose love for the wife of a banished revolutionary brings on the chaos the king has fought to prevent, this five-act play was never published in Nabokov's lifetime and lay in manuscript until it appeared in a Russian literary journal in 1997. It is an astonishingly precocious work, in exquisite verse, touching for the first time on what would become this great writer's major themes: intense sexual desire and jealousy, the elusiveness of happiness, the power of the imagination, and the eternal battle between truth and fantasy. The Tragedy of Mister Morn is Nabokov's major response to the Russian Revolution, which he had lived through, but it approaches the events of 1917 through the prism of Shakespearean tragedy. Translated by Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan

'Nabokov can move you to laughter in the way that masters can - to laughter that is near to tears' GuardianLev Ganin is a young officer sharing a boarding house in Berlin with a host of Russian émigrés. Alone in his room, he dreams of his first love, Mary. Awash with memories of youth and idyllic scenes of pre-Revolution Russia, Ganin becomes convinced that Mary is in fact the wife of a fellow-boarder, due to arrive at this very house soon. He longs for her arrival, when he can whisk her away and leave everything behind ...

From the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales--eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time--display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers and intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.

Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as a classic not to the controversy its subject matter aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. With an introduction by Martin Amis. When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause c l bre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. Awe and exhilaration-along with heartbreak and mordant wit-abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love-love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books‘And this is fantasy, the flutter, the rapture of fantasy!’A bashful dragon, a lost wood-sprite, the prophet Elijah and the Devil disguised as a middle-aged woman appear in these playful, exuberant stories by Vladimir Nabokov. So do a vengeful husband, a barber confronting his torturer and the author himself, as he recalls his first love. Each of the thirteen tales here enchants and enraptures us, only to gleefully confound our expectations.

Vladimir Nabokov's early novel is the dazzling story of the coarse, strange yet oddly endearing chess-playing genius Luzhin.Discovering his prodigious gift in boyhood and rising to the rank of International Grandmaster, Luzhin develops a lyrical passion for chess that renders the real world a phantom. As he confronts the fiery, swift-swooping Italian Grandmaster Turati, he brings into play his carefully devised defence. Making masterly play of metaphor and imagery, The Defense is the book that, of his early works, Nabokov felt 'contains and diffuses the greatest warmth'.

"Pnin" (1957), chetvertyj anglojazychnyj roman Vladimira Nabokova, posvjaschen zhiznennym peripetijam odnogo iz samykh bezzaschitnykh i trogatelnykh personazhej v literature XX veka. Nastojaschij russkij intelligent, prekrasnyj uchenyj, no chelovek chudakovatyj i nezadachlivyj, Timofej Pnin, pokinuvshij Rossiju posle revoljutsii 1917 goda, prepodaet russkuju slovesnost v amerikanskom universitete, gde stanovitsja sluchajnoj zhertvoj intrig i cherstvosti kolleg. Udastsja li emu na etot raz uskolznut ot svoego khitroumnogo sozdatelja, ugotovivshego emu uchast stradaltsa, vynuzhdennogo raz za razom snosit udary sudby?"Pnin" uvidel svet vskore posle skandalnoj "Lolity" i, poluchiv vostorzhennye otzyvy chitatelej i kritikov, posluzhil svoego roda antitezoj bytujuschemu predstavleniju o "beznravstvennosti" i "bezdushii"Nabokova.Nastojaschee izdanie romana soprovozhdaetsja predisloviem, primechanijami i zakljuchitelnym ocherkom perevodchika.Sokhraneny osobennosti orfografii, punktuatsii i transliteratsii perevodchika.

"Pnin" (1957), chetvertyj anglojazychnyj roman Vladimira Nabokova, posvjaschen zhiznennym peripetijam odnogo iz samykh bezzaschitnykh i trogatelnykh personazhej v literature XX veka. Nastojaschij russkij intelligent, prekrasnyj uchenyj, no chelovek chudakovatyj i nezadachlivyj, Timofej Pnin, pokinuvshij Rossiju posle revoljutsii 1917 goda, prepodaet russkuju slovesnost v amerikanskom universitete, gde stanovitsja sluchajnoj zhertvoj intrig i cherstvosti kolleg. Udastsja li emu na etot raz uskolznut ot svoego khitroumnogo sozdatelja, ugotovivshego emu uchast stradaltsa, vynuzhdennogo raz za razom snosit udary sudby?"Pnin" uvidel svet vskore posle skandalnoj "Lolity" i, poluchiv vostorzhennye otzyvy chitatelej i kritikov, posluzhil svoego roda antitezoj bytujuschemu predstavleniju o "beznravstvennosti" i "bezdushii"Nabokova.Nastojaschee izdanie romana soprovozhdaetsja predisloviem, primechanijamii zakljuchitelnym ocherkom perevodchika.Sokhraneny osobennosti orfografii, punktuatsii i transliteratsiiperevodchika.

'One of the greatest books I've ever read. Its heart is strange, but it is huge; let yours beat in response' MARY GAITSKILLPale Fire, a 999-line poem, is the final work of the celebrated - and recently murdered - American author, John Francis Shade.Here that poem is transcribed, introduced and annotated (at length) by Shade's fellow scholar, neighbour and apparent friend, Charles Kinbote.Approaching this task with gusto, Kinbote's annotations reveal conclusive evidence of his own impact on Shade, disguised references to the northern land of Zembla, which he may or may not have once ruled over, and fuel for his many preoccupations and paranoia.And - as his annotations become more desperate, more deluded, more deranged - Kinbote unintentionally sheds new light on the poet's last days and the pair's 'glorious friendship'.A murder mystery, a work of wild invention, a reimagining of what the novel can do, a piece of exquisite comedy, Pale Fire is widely regarded as Nabokov's masterpiece and one of the most brilliant novels ever written.A W&N Essential with an introduction from Mary Gaitskill

Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched at the heart of an American campus. Battling with American life and language, Pnin must face great hazards in this new world: the ruination of his beautiful lumber-room-as-office; the removal of his teeth and the fitting of new ones; the search for a suitable boarding house; and the trials of taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has yet to master.Wry, intelligent and moving, Pnin reveals the absurd and affecting story of one man in exile.

Vladimir Nabakov's shocking masterpiece, now in a beautifully designed clothbound edition'Lolita is comedy, subversive yet divine' Martin AmisPoet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A tortured soul or a monster? Humbert Humbert's seduction is one of many dimensions in Nabokov's dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures. Filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 starring James Mason and Peter Sellers, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne starring Jeremy Irons and Melanie Griffith, Lolita has lost none of its power to shock and awe.

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-SmithCelebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.Thirteen ingeniously crafted stories make up Vladimir Nabokov's baker's dozen. In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, with nowhere to escape. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can be snatched, waylay their victims. Like the shimmer of the sea, the gleam of a glass caught by the sun, these stories sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve again.

'Masterly, hilarious, truly insightful' - Philip Hensher, The Spectator A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2019 The last major collection of Nabokov's published material, Think, Write, Speak brings together a treasure trove of previously uncollected texts from across the author's extraordinary career. Each phase of his wandering life is included, from a precocious essay written while still at Cambridge in 1921, through his fame in the aftermath of the publication of Lolita to the final, fascinating interviews given shortly before his death in 1977. Introduced and edited by his biographer Brian Boyd, this is an essential work for anyone who has been drawn into Nabokov's literary orbit. Here he is at his most inspirational, curious, playful, misleading and caustic. The seriousness of his aesthetic credo, his passion for great writing and his mix of delight and dismay at his own, sudden global fame in the 1950s are all brilliantly delineated.

"man ser vitterligt verden på en ny måde efter at have læst Nabokov." – 6 stjerner, Kristeligt Dagblad"Smukt oversat romanmesterværk" – Weekendavisen"Læs for guds skyld Nabokov, læs for guds skyld Pnin" – AtlasPnin fra 1957 af Vladimir Nabokov er tredje bind i Turbines nye serie af oversatte skønlitterære klassikere.Den sindige, 55-årige Timofey Pnin lever et stille liv i Amerika, hvor han underviser i russisk sprog og litteratur på Waindell College. Pnin er både hos sine studerende og ved det amerikanske ægtepar, han lejer et værelse hos, en komisk figur, kendt for sin excentricitet og pudsige indfald. Men indeni den russiske klovn lever dramaet, både i det små og i det store, og det har det med at vise sig i stadig større sprækker i Pnins facade.Som 17-årig flygtede han med forældrene fra den russiske revolution, han kæmpede kortvarigt for den hvide hær, men landede til sidst i Paris, hvor begge forældre omkom af tyfus. Da Hitler kommer til magten må Pnin igen flygte, denne gang med en utro kone, som udnytter ham til sin egen flugt, over Atlanten til Amerika, hvor han klæder sig pænt på og forsøger at skjule sit traumefyldte liv. Men da Pnin skal holde et foredrag for en gruppe Ruslands-interesserede kvinder, kigger han ud over publikum og ser sine forældre sidde i forrådnet tilstand, skolekammeraten, som blev skudt gennem hovedet i Odessa af de røde, og ungdomskæresten, som døde i en koncentrationslejr, vinker til ham fra første række; og Pnins stivnede smil og høflige manerer kan ikke længere skærme et indre, som er ved at bryde sammen.Vladimir Nabokov blev født i Sankt Petersborg i 1899. Hans familie måtte flygte fra revolutionen i 1917 og endte først i Berlin og siden Paris, hvorfra Nabokov flygtede videre til Amerika ved starten af 2. Verdenskrig. Nabokovs bror Sergei omkom i Neuengamme. Nabokov har skrevet sine romaner på både russisk, tysk og, efter at være ankommet til Amerika, på engelsk. Mesterværket Lolita udkom på fransk, da ingen amerikanske forlag ville antage den. Pnin blev i 1957 Nabokovs helt store gennembrud på den litterære scene med sin fortælling om et traumefyldt liv.

Thirteen strangely wrought, ingeniously crafted stories make up Nabokov's baker's dozen. In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, with nowhere to escape to. Their dreams lie stifled, smothered by routine and repetition, and frustrations lurk in all the corners. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can be snatched, waylay their victims. Like the shimmer of the sea, the gleam of a glass caught by the sun, they sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve again.

These masterly poems span the decades of Nabokov's career, from 'Music', written in 1914, to the short, playful 'To Vera', composed in 1974. 'The University Poem', one of Nabokov's major poetic works, is here in English for the first time: an extraordinary autobiographical poem looking back at his time at Cambridge, with its dinners, girls and memories, it is suffused with rich description, wit and verbal dexterity. Included too are the surreally comic 'A Literary Dinner', the enchanting, 'Eve', the wryly humorous 'An Evening of Russian Poetry' and a meditation on the act of creation, 'Tolstoy', as well as verse written on America, lepidoptery, sport, love and Nabokov's Russian homeland.

'In general Glory is my happiest thing.' 'The fun of Glory is . . . to be sought in the echoing and linking of minor events, in back-and-forth switches, which produce an illusion of impetus; in an old daydream directly becoming the blessing of the ball hugged to one's chest, or in the casual vision of Martin's mother grieving beyond the time-frame of the novel in an abstraction of the future that the reader can only guess at, even after he has raced through the last seven chapters where a regular madness of structural twists and a masquerade of all characters culminate in a furious finale, although nothing much happens at the very end - just a bird perching on a wicket in the greyness of a wet day' - Vladimir Nabokov

The acclaimed author of Lolita offers unique insight into works by James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jane Austen, and others -- with an introduction by John Updike.In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov's teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction.This volume collects Nabokov's famous lectures on Western European literature, with analysis and commentary on Charles Dickens's Bleak House, Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Marcel Proust's The Walk by Swann's Place, Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and other works. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers.