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| irina guadanini: Vladimir Nabokov Brian Boyd, 2016-06-10 This first major critical biography of Vladimir Nabokov, one of the greatest of twentieth-century writers, finally allows us full access to the dramatic details of his life and the depths of his art. An intensely private man, Nabokov was uprooted first by the Russian Revolution and then by World War II. Transformed into a permanent wanderer, he did not achieve fame until late in life, with the success of Lolita. In this first of two volumes, Brian Boyd vividly describes the liberal milieu of the aristocratic Nabokovs, their escape from Russia, Nabokov's education at Cambridge, and the murder of his father in Berlin. Boyd then turns to the years that Nabokov spent, impoverished, in Germany and France, until the coming of Hitler forced him to flee, with wife and son, to the United States. This volume stands on its own as a fascinating exploration of Nabokov's Russian years and Russian worlds, prerevolutionary and émigré. In the course of his ten years' work on the biography, Boyd traveled along Nabokov's trail everywhere from Yalta to Palo Alto. The only scholar to have had free access to the Nabokov archives in Montreux and the Library of Congress, he also interviewed at length Nabokov's family and scores of his friends and associates. For the general reader, Boyd offers an introduction to Nabokov the man, his works, and his world. For the specialist, he provides a basis for all future research on Nabokov's life and art, as he dates and describes the composition of all Nabokov's works, published and unpublished. Boyd investigates Nabokov's relation to and his independence from his time, examines the special structures of his mind and thought, and explains the relations between his philosophy and his innovations of literary strategy and style. At the same time he provides succinct introductions to all the fiction, dramas, memoirs, and major verse; presents detailed analyses of the major books that break new ground for the scholar, while providing easy paths into the works for other readers; and shows the relationship between Nabokov's life and the themes and subjects of his art. |
| irina guadanini: Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting Gerard de Vries, Donald Barton Johnson, 2006 Studie van de verwijzingen naar beeldende kunst in het werk van de Russisch-Amerikaanse schrijver (1899-1977). |
| irina guadanini: In the Shadow of Greatness Michael Menager, 2020-09-01 In this unusual biography, Michael Menager coaxes from the shadows of history ?ve women who devoted themselves to the greatness of a genius in their lives. At times the book reads like a love story, at other times an adventure, but throughout, their five lives intertwine to tell one story of selfless devotion and a greatness that doesn’t crave recognition. This book covers the lives and works of Maria Nhys (wife of Aldous Huxley), Françoise Gilot (mistress of Pablo Picasso), Véra Nabokov (wife of Vladimir Nabokov), Helen Dukas (secretary to Albert Einstein), and Isabel Burton (wife and partner of Sir Richard Burton). |
| irina guadanini: Véra Stacy Schiff, 2011-02-23 WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the award–winning author of The Revolutionary and The Witches comes “an elegantly nuanced portrait of [Vladimir Nabokov’s] wife, showing us just how pivotal Nabokov’s marriage was to his hermetic existence and how it indelibly shaped his work.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times ONE OF ESQUIRE’S 50 BEST BIOGRAPHIES OF ALL TIME “Monumental.”—The Boston Globe “Utterly romantic.”—New York magazine “Deeply moving.”—The Seattle Times Stacy Schiff brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time: Vladimir Nabokov, émigré author of Lolita; Pale Fire; and Speak, Memory, and his beloved wife, Véra. Nabokov wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife, and third for no one at all. “Without my wife,” he once noted, “I wouldn’t have written a single novel.” Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the twentieth century, the story of the Nabokovs’ fifty-two-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. Véra, both beautiful and brilliant, is its outsized heroine—a woman who loves as deeply and intelligently as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy. Stacy Schiff's Véra is a triumph of the biographical form. |
| irina guadanini: Silent Love Gerard Vries, 2019-08-28 The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is one of Vladimir Nabokov’s most autobiographical novels and it has often been observed that Sebastian’s passionate affair with the femme fatale Nina Rechnoy is a dramatized extension of Nabokov’s infatuation with Irina Guadanini. In this book it is shown that the novel also conceals another, secluded, love affair Sebastian had with a man, which reflects the main episode in the life of Nabokov’s brother Sergey. By pursuing many biographical and literary references and allusions, and by disregarding the deceptive guiding by the narrator (Sebastian’s half-brother), this moving story about Sebastian’s silent love becomes brightly visible. |
| irina guadanini: On Nabokov, Ayn Rand and the Libertarian Mind Gene H. Bell-Villada, 2014-07-08 On Nabokov, Ayn Rand and the Libertarian Mind not only conjoins two seemingly divergent authors but also takes on the larger picture of libertarian trends and ideologies. These timely topics further intermingle with Bell-Villada’s own conflicted relationship – personal, cultural, satirical, literary – to the “odd pair” and their ways of thinking. The inclusion of Louis Begley’s essay adds yet another dimension to this unique, wide-ranging meditation on art and politics, history and memory. |
| irina guadanini: A Revolver to Carry at Night Monika Zgustova, 2024-04-09 A captivating, nuanced portrait of the life of Véra Nabokov, who dedicated herself to advancing her husband’s writing career, playing a vital role in the creation of his greatest works. Véra Nabokov (1902–1991) was in many ways the epitome of the wife of a great man: keenly aware of her husband’s extraordinary talent, she decided to make his success her ultimate goal, throughout fifty-two years of marriage until his death in 1977. The first reader of his texts, Véra worked as typist and editor. She organized their lives in exile, as they traveled to Berlin, Paris, Switzerland, and, most importantly, the US, where she convinced Vladimir to focus on writing novels in English. She not only controlled the family’s finances and contract negotiations, but also attempted to control his friendships—particularly with women—going so far as to audit his classes. In a rich, sweeping novel, Monika Zgustova immerses us in the daily life of this remarkable couple, offering insights into their complex personal and professional relationships. Véra considered herself an independent woman, but was she really, when her husband took up so much space? And without Véra, could Nabokov have become one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers? |
| irina guadanini: Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? Jenny Diski, 2021-10-15 Finalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism 'Nothing about Jenny Diski is conventional. Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring ... highly intelligent, furiously funny' Sunday Times 'Funny, heartbreaking, insightful and wise' Emilia Clarke 'She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be' New Yorker Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books – selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude – have been described as 'virtuoso performances', and 'small masterpieces'. From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated – and mordantly funny. |
| irina guadanini: Nabokov in America Robert Roper, 2016-12-13 Born to an eminent Russian family, Vladimir Nabokov came to America fleeing the Nazis and remembered his time here as the richest of his life. Indeed, his best work flowed from his response to this storied land. With charm and insight, Robert Roper fills out this period in the writer's life: his friendship with Edmund Wilson, his time at Cornell, his role at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. But Nabokov in America finds its narrative heart in his and his family's serial sojourns into the West. Roper has mined fresh sources to bring detail to these journeys, and traces their significant influence in Nabokov's work: on two-lane highways and in late-'40s motels and cafés, we feel Lolita draw near, and understand Nabokov's seductive familiarity with the American mundane. Nabokov in America is also a love letter to U.S. literature, in Nabokov's broad embrace of it from Melville to the Beats. Reading Roper, we feel anew the rich learning and the Romantic mind behind some of Nabokov's most beloved books. |
| irina guadanini: Letters to Véra Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, 2015 A collection of letters between Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, Vera-- |
| irina guadanini: Nabokov's Eros and the Poetics of Desire M. Couturier, 2014-06-03 Nabokov gained international fame with Lolita, a highly erotic and morally disturbing novel. Through its comprehensive study of the amorous and sexual behaviors of Nabokov's characters this book shows how Eros, both as a clown or a pervert, contributes to the poetic excellence of his novels and accounts for the unfolding of the plots. |
| irina guadanini: The Wives Alexandra Popoff, 2021-11-15 Many readers may know that such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence used their marriages for literary inspiration and material. In Russian literary marriages, these women did not resent taking a secondary position, although to call their position secondary does not do justice to the vital role these women played in the creation of some of the greatest literary works in history. From Sofia Tolstoy to Vera Nabokov and Elena Mandelshtam and Natalya Solzhenitsyn, these women ranged from stenographers and typists to editors, researchers, translators, and even publishers. Living under restrictive regimes, many of these women battled censorship and preserved the writers’ illicit archives, often risking their own lives to do so. They established a tradition all their own, unmatched in the West. Many of these women, like Vera and Sofia, were the writers’ intellectual companions and willingly contributed to the creative process—they commonly used the word “we” to describe the progress of their husbands’ work. And their husbands knew it too. Leo Tolstoy made no secret of Sofia’s involvement in War and Peace, and Vladimir Nabokov referred to Vera as his own “single shadow.” |
| irina guadanini: Transitional Nabokov Will Norman, Duncan White, 2009 This collection of original essays is concerned with one of the most important writers of the twentieth century: Vladimir Nabokov. The book features contributions from both well-established and new scholars, and represents the latest developments in research. The essays all address the possibility of reading Nabokov's works as operating between categories of various kinds - whether linguistic, formal, historical or national. In doing so, they explore exciting new paradigms for approaching Nabokov's oeuvre. The volume brings together a diverse range of critical voices from around the world, to respond to some of the most urgent questions raised about Nabokov's work. Topics covered include the relationship between his artistic and scientific work, his influences on contemporary fiction, and the development of his aesthetics over his career. Drawing variously on archive research, alternative readings of key texts, and fresh theoretical approaches, this book injects new impetus into Nabokov studies as it continues to evolve as a discipline. |
| irina guadanini: Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky Bryan Karetnyk, 2017-04-27 SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 READ RUSSIA PRIZE Imagine that many of Russia's greatest writers of the twentieth century were entirely unknown in the West, and only recently discovered in Russia itself. Strange as it may seem, it is in fact true, and their rediscovery is setting the literary world alight. Names such as Gaito Gazdanov and Vasily Yanovsky have excited great interest in Russia, and with stories of gambling, drug abuse, love, death, suicide, madness, espionage, glittering high society and the seedy underworld of Europe's capitals, their appeal is extremely broad. Many of these writers' works are only now being published in Russia for the first time, alongside those of leading contemporary authors - and to great critical acclaim. And we aren't just talking about two or three obscure authors; there are, quite literally, dozens of them. |
| irina guadanini: A Left-Handed Woman Judith Thurman, 2022-12-06 WINNER OF THE 2023 PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY A collection of essays from Judith Thurman, the National Book Award–winning biographer and New Yorker staff writer. Judith Thurman, a prolific staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, has gathered a selection of her essays and profiles in A Left-Handed Woman. They consider our culture in all its guises: literature, history, politics, gender, fashion, and art, though their paramount subject is the human condition. Thurman is one of the preeminent essayists of our time—“a master of vivisection,” as Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times. “When she’s done with a subject, it’s still living, mystery intact.” |
| irina guadanini: Nabokov and Indeterminacy Priscilla Meyer, 2018-08-15 In Nabokov and Indeterminacy, Priscilla Meyer shows how Vladimir Nabokov’s early novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight illuminates his later work. Meyer first focuses on Sebastian Knight, exploring how Nabokov associates his characters with systems of subtextual references to Russian, British, and American literary and philosophical works. She then turns to Lolita and Pale Fire, applying these insights to show that these later novels clearly differentiate the characters through subtextual references, and that Sebastian Knight’s construction models that of Pale Fire. Meyer argues that the dialogue Nabokov constructs among subtexts explores his central concern: the continued existence of the spirit beyond bodily death. She suggests that because Nabokov’s art was a quest for an unattainable knowledge of the otherworldly, knowledge which can never be conclusive, Nabokov’s novels are never closed in plot, theme, or resolution—they take as their hidden theme the unfinalizability that Bakhtin says characterizes all novels. The conclusions of Nabokov's novels demand a rereading, and each rereading yields a different novel. The reader can never get back to the same beginning, never attain a conclusion, and instead becomes an adept of Nabokov’s quest. Meyer emphasizes that, unlike much postmodern fiction, the contradictions created by Nabokov’s multiple paths do not imply that existence is constructed arbitrarily of pre-existing fragments, but rather that these fragments lead to an ever-deepening approach to the unknowable. |
| irina guadanini: Vladimir Nabokov Neil Cornwell, 1999 Vladimir Nabokov's extraordinary literary career, as a master of Russian and English prose, is unique. Acclaimed in the limited Russian émigré world, under the name of Sirin, Nabokov switched to writing in English and settled in America, a refugee from Hitler's Europe. Exile, memory, lost love and the magic of childhood are among his themes; stylistic and structural dexterity are his hallmarks; Lolita (ranked number 4 in the 1998 New York Modern Library list of 100 best novels of the century published in English) enabled him to retire to a final and productive period of European residence. Film versions of his most controversial novel keep Nabokov's name before the public, while almost his entire oeuvre remains currently available in paperback. Neil Cornwell's study, published for the Nabokov centenary, examines five of Nabokov's major novels, plus his short stories and critical writings, situating his work against the ever-expanding mass of VN scholarship, and noting his cultural debt to Russia, Europe, America and the British Isles. |
| irina guadanini: The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir E. Alexandrov, 2014-05-22 First published in 1995. This companion constitutes a virtual encyclopaedia of Nabokov, and occupies a unique niche in scholarship about him. Articles on individual works by Nabokov, including his short stories and poetry, provide a brief survey of critical reactions and detailed analyses from diverse vantage points. For anyone interested in Nabokov, from scholars to readers who love his works, this is an ideal guide. Its chronology of Nabokov's life and works, bibliographies of primary and secondary works, and a detailed index make it easy to find reliable information any aspect of Nabokov's rich legacy. |
| irina guadanini: Nabokov's Butterflies Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, 2000 Literature and Lepidoptera dance an elaborate pas de deux through seventy years of Vladimir Nabokov's life, from his boyhood in Russia to his life as an emigre in the Crimea, Berlin, France, the United States, and finally in Switzerland. An American literary giant, Nabokov also produced first-rate work as a scientist, and in his fiction and elsewhere eloquently advocated attention to the details of the natural world and promoted the delights of discovery. Nabokov's Butterflies presents Nabokov's twin passions through an astonishingly rich array of novel selections, stories, poems, screenplay, autobiography, criticism, lecturers, articles, reviews, interviews, letters, and notes, plus a wealth of beautiful and fanciful drawings by Nabokov and photographs of him in the field.--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
| irina guadanini: Vladimir Nabokov D. Rampton, 2012-11-13 A clearly written, insightful study of Nabokov the novelist, providing an expert analysis of the 17 novels he wrote during a career spanning more than 50 years: one of the most impressive, challenging, and controversial literary achievements of our time. |
| irina guadanini: Nabokov’s Secret Trees Stephen H. Blackwell, 2024-06-03 In nearly all his literary works, Vladimir Nabokov inscribed networks of trees to create meaningful patterns of significance around one or more of his passionate interests – in consciousness, memory, creativity, epistemology, ethics, and love, with a deep connection to nature serving as a constant undercurrent. Nabokov’s Secret Trees explores this neglected area of his art, one that positions nature as a hidden but vital core of his work. The book presents an entirely new, previously unsuspected Nabokov, one who crafts intricate patterns of arboreal imagery lurking behind his often-baroque psychological narratives. It reveals how Nabokov activates arboreal potentials by exploring the hidden ubiquity of trees, their essence as complex natural phenomena, and their role as quiet presences that have accompanied and fostered human civilization and art since their beginnings. The book uncovers how trees offer a rich and intricate field for structural, semantic, allusive, and metaphorical exploration. Based on the published corpus as well as archival materials, Nabokov’s Secret Trees demonstrates that trees not only populate Nabokov’s art in stunning, yet furtive, abundance, but also as mysterious natural entities, directly animating his works’ worlds and his readers’ experience of them. |
| irina guadanini: Vladimir Nabokov in Context David M. Bethea, Siggy Frank, 2018-05-24 Vladimir Nabokov, bilingual writer of dazzling masterpieces, is a phenomenon that both resists and requires contextualization. This book challenges the myth of Nabokov as a sole genius who worked in isolation from his surroundings, as it seeks to anchor his work firmly within the historical, cultural, intellectual and political contexts of the turbulent twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov in Context maps the ever-changing sites, people, cultures and ideologies of his itinerant life which shaped the production and reception of his work. Concise and lively essays by leading scholars reveal a complex relationship of mutual influence between Nabokov's work and his environment. Appealing to a wide community of literary scholars this timely companion to Nabokov's writing offers new insights and approaches to one of the most important, and yet most elusive writers of modern literature. |
| irina guadanini: Nabokov's Theatrical Imagination Siggy Frank, 2012-01-12 Drawing on a wealth of unpublished archival material, this study offers a comprehensive assessment of the importance of theatrical performance in Vladimir Nabokov's thinking and writing. Siggy Frank provides fresh insights into Nabokov's wider aesthetics and arrives at new readings of his narrative fiction. As well as emphasising the importance of theatrical performance to our understanding of Nabokov's texts, she demonstrates that the theme of theatricality runs through the central concerns of Nabokov's art and life: the nature of fiction, the relationship between the author and his fictional world, textual origin and derivation, authorial control and textual property, literary appropriations and adaptations, and finally the transformation of the writer himself from the Russian émigré writer Sirin to the American novelist Nabokov. |
| irina guadanini: Finding Nabokov Larry Gaffney, 2025-02-19 Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was one of the most fascinating literary figures of the 20th century. Known primarily as the author of Lolita, he was at first scorned as a pornographer but eventually hailed as the writer of a masterpiece. A Russian born into wealth and privilege, he was forced into exile by the Bolshevik Revolution. Married to a Jewish woman and living in poverty in Berlin, he fled first to Paris and then to America, always barely one step ahead of the Nazis. His 50-year career encompassed the creation of brilliant novels, teaching positions at Wellesley and Cornell, and work as a respected scientist in lepidoptery at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. This A-Z guide to Nabokov's life and achievements runs the gamut from Academe, that rarefied, collegiate realm of Nabokov's most biting satires, to Zoorland, a fictitious totalitarian country that bans the arts because they give talented people opportunities to rise above the masses. |
| irina guadanini: Magda Nachman Lina Bernstein, 2020-06-23 The political and social turmoil of the twentieth century took Magda Nachman from a privileged childhood in St. Petersburg at the close of the nineteenth century, artistic studies with Léon Bakst and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin at the Zvantseva Art Academy, and participation in the dynamic symbolist/modernist artistic ferment in pre-Revolutionary Russia to a refugee existence in the Russian countryside during the Russian Civil War followed by marriage to a prominent Indian nationalist, then with her husband to the hardships of émigré Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, and finally to Bombay, where she established herself as an important artist and a mentor to a new generation of modern Indian artists. |
| irina guadanini: Nabokov and his Books Duncan White, 2017-03-09 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. 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 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 reconceptualises the way we think about one of the most important and influential novelists of the twentieth century. |
| irina guadanini: Nabokov in Motion Yuri Leving, 2022-02-10 Adopting the modernist master Vladimir Nabokov as its guide, Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement is an exploration of the radically changing social, historical, technological, and literary culture of the early 20th century, a time when modes of communication and transportation, especially, were changing society in drastic and profound ways. Across seventy microchapters that are by turn serious, ironic, informative, and playful, and which take on topics such as automobiles, trains, airplanes, electricity, elevators, advertisements, telegraphs, and telephones, Yuri Leving offers new ways to understand Nabokov, Russian literature, and technology, modernism, and world material culture. Nabokov's writings are analyzed against a broad context of prose and poetry and from the point of view of what Leving calls the poetics of urbanism in literature. Nabokov in Motion is a ground-breaking exploration of urban and material themes in literature and creates a complex and vibrant cultural fabric of which Nabokov is the master weaver. |
| irina guadanini: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, 2008 Nabokov's first novel in English, one of his greatest and most overlooked, with a new Introduction by Michael Dirda. |
| irina guadanini: Style is Matter Leland De la Durantaye, 2007 How should we read Lolita? The beginning of an answer is that we should read it the way all great works deserve to be read: with attention and intelligence. But what sort of attention should we pay and what sort of intelligence should we apply to a work of art that recounts so much love, so much loss, so much thoughtlessness--and across which flashes something we might be tempted to call evil? To begin with, we should read with the attention and intelligence we call empathy. A point on which all readers can agree is that great literature offers us a lesson in empathy: it encourages us to feel with the strange and the familiar, the strong and the weak, the vulgar and the cultivated, the young and the old, the lover and the beloved. It urges us to see our own fates as connected to those of others, to link the starry sky we see above us with whatever moral laws we might sense within.--from Style is MatterSome of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade--demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out.--Vladimir Nabokov, Strong OpinionsWith this quote Leland de la Durantaye launches his elegant and incisive exploration of the ethics of art in the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov. Focusing on Lolita but also addressing other major works (especially Speak, Memory and Pale Fire), the author asks whether the work of this writer whom many find cruel contains a moral message and, if so, why that message is so artfully concealed. Style is Matter places Nabokov's work once and for all into dialogue with some of the most basic issues concerning the ethics of writing and of reading itself.De la Durantaye argues that Humbert's narrative confession artfully seduces the reader into complicity with his dark fantasies and even darker acts until the very end, where he expresses his bitter regret for what he has done. In this sense, Lolita becomes a study in the danger of art, the artist's responsibility to the real world, and the perils and pitfalls of reading itself. In addition to Nabokov's fictions, de la Durantaye also draws on his nonfiction writings to explore Nabokov's belief that all genuine art is deceptive--as is nature itself. Through de la Durantaye's deft and compelling writing, we see that Nabokov learned valuable lessons in mimicry and camouflage from the intricate patterns of the butterflies he adored. |
| irina guadanini: Vladimir Nabokov Barbara Wyllie, 2010-04-15 Best known for his deeply controversial 1955 novel, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) is celebrated as one of the most distinctive literary stylists of the twentieth century. In Vladimir Nabokov, Barbara Wyllie presents a comprehensive account of the life and works of the writer, from his childhood and earliest stories in pre-revolutionary Russia, to The Original of Laura—a novel written almost entirely on index cards published for the first time in 2009, perhaps against Nabokov’s wishes. This literary biography investigates the author’s poetry and prose, in both Russian and English, and examines the relationship between Nabokov’s extraordinary erudition and the themes that recur throughout his works. His expertise as a specialist in butterflies complemented his wide knowledge of Russian and Western European culture, philosophy, and history, and informed the themes of transformation and transcendence that dominate his work. Wyllie traces his lifelong preoccupations with time, memory, and mortality across both his Russian and English works, and she illuminates his distinctive through detailed analysis of his major novels. Wyllie assesses his poetry and prose style alongside Nabokov’s own autobiography, letters, and critical writings—as well as the only recently-published The Original of Laura—in order to create a complete and updated picture of the writer in the context of his works. Vladimir Nabokov presents a fascinating portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most eclectic, prolific, and controversial authors. It is an essential read for fans of Nabokov and scholars of twentieth century English and Russian literature. |
| irina guadanini: The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov Andrea Pitzer, 2021-11-15 A startling and revelatory examination of Nabokov’s life and works—notably Pale Fire and Lolita—bringing new insight into one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic authors. Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fled France with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis. He repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering to write artful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in the English language really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so many critics? Using information from newly-declassified intelligence files and recovered military history, Pitzer argues that far from being a proponent of art for art’s sake, Nabokov managed to hide disturbing history in his fiction—history that has gone unnoticed for decades. Nabokov emerges as a kind of documentary conjurer, spending decades of his career recording a saga of forgotten concentration camps and searing bigotry, from WWI to the Gulag and the Holocaust. Lolita surrenders Humbert Humbert’s secret identity, and reveals a Nabokov appalled by American anti-Semitism. The lunatic narrator of Pale Fire recalls Russian tragedies that once haunted the world. From Tsarist courts to Nazi film sets, from the CIA to wartime Casablanca, the story of Nabokov’s family is the story of his century—and both are woven inextricably into his fiction. |
| irina guadanini: The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov Paul Russell, 2011-11-08 In his novel based on the extraordinary life of the brother of Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Russell re-creates the rich and changing world in which Sergey, his family and friends lived; from wealth and position in pre-revolutionary Russia to the halls of Cambridge University and the Parisian salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. But it is the honesty and vulnerability of Sergey, our young gay narrator, that hook the reader: his stuttering childhood in the shadow of his brilliant brother, his opium-fueled evenings with Cocteau, his troubled love life on the margins of the Ballets Russes and its legendary cast, and his isolation in war-torn Berlin. A meticulously researched novel, featuring an extraordinary cast of characters (including Picasso, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Magnus Hirschfield, and of course the master himself, Vladimir Nabokov), this is ultimately the story of a beautiful and vulnerable boy growing into an enlightened and courageous man. |
| irina guadanini: Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts Dana Dragunoiu, 2021-09-15 Winner, 2022 Brian Boyd Prize for Best Second Book on Nabokov This book shows how ethics and aesthetics interact in the works of one of the most celebrated literary stylists of the twentieth century: the Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Dana Dragunoiu reads Nabokov’s fictional worlds as battlegrounds between an autonomous will and heteronomous passions, demonstrating Nabokov’s insistence that genuinely moral acts occur when the will triumphs over the passions by answering the call of duty. Dragunoiu puts Nabokov’s novels into dialogue with the work of writers such as Alexander Pushkin, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, and Marcel Proust; with Kantian moral philosophy; with the institution of the modern duel of honor; and with the European traditions of chivalric literature that Nabokov studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge University. This configuration of literary influences and philosophical contexts allows Dragunoiu to advance an original and provocative argument about the formation, career, and legacies of an author who viewed moral activity as an art, and for whom artistic and moral acts served as testaments to the freedom of the will. |
| irina guadanini: The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography Maria DiBattista, Emily O. Wittman, 2014-05-29 A historical overview of autobiography from the works of Augustine, Montaigne, and Rousseau to the Romantic, Victorian, and modern eras. |
| irina guadanini: Vladimir Nabokov John Lennard, 2012-10-21 An illuminating study of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel with special attention to its film versions. From its first publication in 1955 Nabokov's Lolita has been denounced as immoral filth, hailed as a moral masterpiece, and both praised and damned for stylistic excess. In this fresh appraisal John Lennard provides convenient overviews of Nabokov's life and of the novel (including both Kubrick's and Lyne's film-adaptations), before considering Lolita as pornography, as lepidoptery, as film noir, and as parody. |
| irina guadanini: Focus On: 100 Most Popular American Agnostics Wikipedia contributors, |
| irina guadanini: Nabokov's Women Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, 2017-10-15 This volume studies the enigmatic but silent heroines Nabokov brings to the page. Chapter 4, Nabokov's Mermaid: 'Spring in Fialta' by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, is not available in the ebook format due to digital rights restrictions. You can find the earlier version of the chapter in the journal Nabokov Studies. |
| irina guadanini: Somebody with a Little Hammer Mary Gaitskill, 2018-04-17 In essays on matters literary, social, cultural, and personal, Mary Gaitskill explores date rape and political adultery, the transcendentalism of the Talking Heads, the melancholy of Björk, and the playfulness of artist Laurel Nakadate. She celebrates the clownish grandiosity and the poetry of Norman Mailer’s long career and maps the sociosexual cataclysm embodied by porn star Linda Lovelace. Witty, wide-ranging, tender, and beautiful, Somebody with a Little Hammer displays the same heat-seeking, revelatory understanding for which Gaitskill’s writing has always been known. |
| irina guadanini: Nabokov on the Heights Maxim D., Shrayer, 2025-04-29 Since 1997, author and scholar Maxim D. Shrayer has been offering seminars on Vladimir Nabokov, the great Russian American immigrant writer, at Boston College. This volume features essays by undergraduate and graduate students, which originated in the Nabokov seminar, as well as scholarship by Boston College faculty who work on Nabokov. The essays cover a broad thematic and intellectual terrain and showcase cutting-edge Nabokov scholarship and criticism. The topics include but are not limited to: translingualism, sexuality, Cold War politics, food studies, Nabokov and the visual arts, religion and metaphysics, urban studies, immigration studies, and modernist poetics. The collection will be of great interest to students and scholars, as well as to the broad audience of Nabokovians. |
| irina guadanini: Skin Sergio del Molino, 2021-09-23 Skin is the border of our body and, as such, it is that through which we relate to others but also what separates us from them. Through skin, we speak: when we display it, when we tan it, when we tattoo it, or when we mute it by covering it with clothes. Skin exhibits social relationships, displays power and the effects of power, explains many things about who we are, how others perceive us and how we exist in the world. And when it gets sick, it turns us into monsters. In Skin, Sergio del Molino speaks of these monsters in history and literature, whose lives have been tormented by bad skin: Stalin secretly taking a bath in his dacha, Pablo Escobar getting up late and shutting himself in the shower, Cyndi Lauper performing a commercial for a medicine promising relief from skin disease, John Updike sunburned in the Caribbean, Nabokov writing to his wife from exile, ‘Everything would be fine, if it weren’t for the damned skin.’ As a psoriasis sufferer, Sergio del Molino includes himself in this gallery of monsters through whose stories he delves into the mysteries of skin. What is for some a badge of pride and for others a source of anguish and shame, skin speaks of us and for us when we don’t speak with words. |
Irina - Wikipedia
Irina or Iryna (Cyrillic: Ирина, Ірина) is a feminine given name of Ancient Greek origin, commonly borne by followers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It is derived from Eirene (Ancient Greek: …
Irina | Elden Ring Wiki - Fextralife
Apr 7, 2025 · Elden Ring Irina NPC Guide: Where to find Irina, related quests, services, drops, tips, and tricks.
Meaning, origin and history of the name Irina
Apr 25, 2021 · Form of Irene in several languages. Name Days?
Irina - Baby Name Meaning, Origin, and Popularity
Jun 4, 2025 · The name Irina is a girl's name of Greek, Russian origin meaning "peace". Irina is a Russian ballet-inflected classic, one of the Three Sisters in the Chekhov play.
irina shayk (@irinashayk) • Instagram photos and videos
24M Followers, 477 Following, 802 Posts - irina shayk (@irinashayk) on Instagram: ""
Explore Irina: Meaning, Origin & Popularity - MomJunction
Jun 14, 2024 · The sophisticated yet delicate Irina is a feminine name that carries the timeless definition of ‘peace.’. This name has its roots in Ancient Greek mythology and its deep …
Irina: Name Meaning, Popularity and Info on BabyNames.com
5 days ago · The name Irina is primarily a female name of Russian origin that means Peace. Click through to find out more information about the name Irina on BabyNames.com.
Irina - Wikipedia
Irina or Iryna (Cyrillic: Ирина, Ірина) is a feminine given name of Ancient Greek origin, commonly borne by followers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It is derived from Eirene (Ancient Greek: …
Irina | Elden Ring Wiki - Fextralife
Apr 7, 2025 · Elden Ring Irina NPC Guide: Where to find Irina, related quests, services, drops, tips, and tricks.
Meaning, origin and history of the name Irina
Apr 25, 2021 · Form of Irene in several languages. Name Days?
Irina - Baby Name Meaning, Origin, and Popularity
Jun 4, 2025 · The name Irina is a girl's name of Greek, Russian origin meaning "peace". Irina is a Russian ballet-inflected classic, one of the Three Sisters in the Chekhov play.
irina shayk (@irinashayk) • Instagram photos and videos
24M Followers, 477 Following, 802 Posts - irina shayk (@irinashayk) on Instagram: ""
Explore Irina: Meaning, Origin & Popularity - MomJunction
Jun 14, 2024 · The sophisticated yet delicate Irina is a feminine name that carries the timeless definition of ‘peace.’. This name has its roots in Ancient Greek mythology and its deep …
Irina: Name Meaning, Popularity and Info on BabyNames.com
5 days ago · The name Irina is primarily a female name of Russian origin that means Peace. Click through to find out more information about the name Irina on BabyNames.com.
