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Vladimir Nabokov: Novels & Memoirs 1941–1951

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight | Bend Sinister | Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

Edited by Bryan Boyd

“He came to know the American landscape better than many natives….” — The Wall Street Journal

Overview

Overview

News Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita first published in the U.S. 52 years ago
October 31, 2017

News Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly studies bring together two cultures
October 31, 2017

Influences Arthur Phillips probes the “seamless circle” of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire
October 31, 2017

After a brilliant literary career writing in Russian, Vladimir Nabokov immigrated to the United States in 1940 and went on to an even more brilliant one in English. Between 1939 and 1974 he wrote the autobiography and eight novels now collected by the Library of America in an authoritative three-volume set, earning a place as one of the greatest writers of America, his beloved adopted home.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, published a year after he settled in the U. S., is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer’s half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of a famous author. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, this novel was published in 1941.

Bend Sinister (1947), Nabokov’s most explicitly political novel, is the haunting, dreamlike story of Adam Krug, a quiet philosophy professor caught up in the bureaucratic bungling of a totalitarian police state. “I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer,” Nabokov affirms in his introduction to the novel, but goes on to state: “There can be distinguished, no doubt, certain reflections in the glass caused by idiotic and despicable regimes that we all know and that have brushed against me in the course of my life: worlds of tyranny and torture, of Fascists and Bolshevists, of Philistine thinkers and jack-booted baboons.”

Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1951; revised 1966), Nabokov’s dazzling memoir of his childhood in imperial Russia and exile in Europe, is central to an understanding of his art. With its balance of inner and outer worlds—of family chronicle and private fantasy, revolutions and butterflies, the games of childhood and the disasters of politics—the work that Nabokov called “a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections” is a haunting transmutation of life into art. “I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe…I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love,” he writes toward the end of the book, “so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.”

The texts of this volume incorporate Nabokov’s penciled corrections in his own copies of his works and correct long-standing errors. They are the most authoritative versions available and have been prepared with the assistance of Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist’s son.

Brian Boyd, volume editor, is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is the author of Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.

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ISBN: 978-1-88301118-5 710 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 87 Library of America Series

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