Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins.
The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri.
Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions–which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.
Book Description
The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and popular success of Lolita had made him an international literary figure.
An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, this darkly witty novel of suspense, literary one-upmanship, and political intrigue achieves that rarest of things in literature–perfect tragicomic balance.
With an Introduction by Richard Rorty
空——致謝德 我是慘遭殺害的連雀的陰影, 兇手是玻璃窗上那片虛假的碧空。 ——謝德 ——金波特 ——納博科夫 一心想尋找真實,卻始終跳...
评分纳博科夫写这本书到底要告诉我们什么?是内容本身的意义还是形式带给来的新的尝试和美感?《我的名字叫红》里面也有个凶手,橄榄,蝴蝶,鹳鸟,是谁并不重要,只要知道谋杀是文化冲突造成的内涵就够了。同样,变态的(金伯特眼中的)格拉杜斯追杀逃亡的赞巴拉国王的故事并没什...
评分《微暗的火》,这部文学史上的奇异之作。这部小说由前言、一首四个篇章的长诗、评注和索引构成。著名诗人约翰·谢德被一名罪犯误认自己是判他入狱的法官枪杀,而谢德的邻居——教授查尔斯·金波特真实身份则是俄罗斯以北的白色国度赞巴拉的流亡国王,他一直希望谢德将自己关...
评分在看完纳博科夫的《微暗的火》之后,我捶胸顿足:不是后悔自己没有早早下手写出一本《微暗的火》来,而是对我国古代的大诗人屈原感到气愤和委屈,如果他不是写完《离骚》之后就迅速投江,而是慢慢在那首诗之后细细做些注解,然后里面再加些宫庭逸事,逃亡经历什么的,那么,我...
评分花了差不多两个星期的时间才断断续续的看完《微暗的火》。毫无疑问的是,这本小说绝对是小说史上无法抹掉的一页。我相信,不但在五十年前,即使是现在,甚至在几百年后,这本小说都是不朽的。(请注意,我用不朽来形容《微暗的火》绝不是以其受欢迎的程度言,而是因其独创性。...
"Why do you have two copies of this book?" "Which one? Oh Pale Fire... Pale Fire is not a book."
评分unfinished
评分Very hard-to-read post-modernist novel. Incredibly inspiring
评分To the Shade: you are my spring of shadows. 不能免俗地尤爱诗的部分(只有在这里,华丽的虚幻与徒劳的真实才叮咣作响地合二为一?)恍然有初读锅匠般的艰苦,因着无可挑剔的文字多了许多乐趣。
评分To the Shade: you are my spring of shadows. 不能免俗地尤爱诗的部分(只有在这里,华丽的虚幻与徒劳的真实才叮咣作响地合二为一?)恍然有初读锅匠般的艰苦,因着无可挑剔的文字多了许多乐趣。
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