Nabokov and his Books

At the outbreak of the Second World War Vladimir Nabokov stood on the brink of losing everything all over again. The reputation he had built as the pre-eminent Russian novelist in exile was imperilled. In Nabokov and his Books, Duncan White shows how Nabokov went to America and not only reinvented himself as an American writer but also used the success of Lolita to rescue those Russian books that had been threatened by obscurity. Using previously unpublished and neglected material, White tells the story of Nabokov the professional writer and how he sought to balance his late modernist aesthetics with the demands of a booming American literary marketplace during the Cold War era. As Nabokov’s reputation grew so he took greater and greater control of how his books were produced, making the material form of the book—including forewords, blurbs, covers—part of the novel. In his later novels, including Pale Fire, Ada, and Transparent Things, the idea of the celebrity novelist losing control of his work became the subject of the novels themselves. These plots were replicated in Nabokov’s own biography as he discovered his inability to control the forces the market success of Lolita had unleashed. With new insights into Nabokov’s life and work, this book reconceptualizes the way we think about one of the most important and influential novelists of the twentieth century

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Biography · Literature · Political science · Reputation · World War II · Education, Literature, Philosophy Research · History · Law · Psychology · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies · Vladimir Nabokov Literary Studies · Modernism (Literature) · Novelists · Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899-1977)

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