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
《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...
評分你第一次读这本书的时候,像是走在意大利贵族摆满陈列品的走廊:每处来自文学和艺术的引用,你想起它们的context,读出它们的隐喻;每一种植物,每一种鸟,每一种蝴蝶,你记得它们的生境和样貌;Zemblan的每一个单词,你听出它们来自哪个语言的什么词汇,你怀念北国的乡音;那...
評分读了几本纳氏的书,《洛丽塔》、《普宁》...还不错,但《自斩首之邀》开始,我就有一个个感觉,那就是老觉着纳氏看着我们为他的作品头痛而暗自偷笑——“你们费尽心思地想找寻些什么?那只是我丢弃的一团乱麻。”
評分是你在读一部小说,还是在写一部小说?《微暗的火》抛出这样一个问题,作为读者的我们不得不接过这猛地抛来的橄榄球。 读完之后发现《微暗的火》并非一个不易通读下来的作品,它行文简单,而且在字里行间似乎都给予了读者一定程度的暗示。所以读者很容易就会在一...
評分這個敘述者真是學渣我看過中最討厭的瞭。commentary部分一開始會給我有點分裂的感覺,再想想就覺得按Kinbote的人設來說,這麼分裂就對瞭。其實說到底,不是很喜歡,但是就是覺得蠻不錯的欸。
评分最偉大的小說!!!A Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem!
评分這個敘述者真是學渣我看過中最討厭的瞭。commentary部分一開始會給我有點分裂的感覺,再想想就覺得按Kinbote的人設來說,這麼分裂就對瞭。其實說到底,不是很喜歡,但是就是覺得蠻不錯的欸。
评分unfinished
评分Very hard-to-read post-modernist novel. Incredibly inspiring
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