The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (82 page)

The Enchanter
is the Ur-
Lolita
, the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom.

Fiction/Literature

THE EYE

The Eye
is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife.

Fiction/Literature

DESPAIR

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965—thirty years after its original publication—
Despair
is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime—his own murder.

Fiction/Literature

THE GIFT

The last of the Nabokov’s novels in Russian,
The Gift
is his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write—a book very much like
The Gift
itself.

Fiction/Literature

GLORY

Glory
is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a young Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him. Convinced that his life is about to be wasted and hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a “perilous, daredevil project”—to illegally re-enter the Soviet Union, from which he had fled in 1919. He succeeds—but at a terrible cost.

Fiction/Literature

KING, QUEEN, KNAVE

This novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing emporium store. Ruddy, self-satisfied, and thoroughly masculine, he is repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead, the myopic Franz.

Fiction/Literature

PALE FIRE

In
Pale Fire
Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade’s self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue.

Fiction/Literature

LAUGHTER IN THE DARK

Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star herself. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.

Fiction/Literature

LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!

As intricate as a house of mirrors, Nabokov’s last novel is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899) whose life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Nabokov himself. Focusing on the central figures of his life—his four wives, his books, and his muse, Dementia—the book leads us to suspect that the fictions Vadim has created have crossed the line between his life’s work and his life itself, as the worlds of reality and literary invention grow increasingly indistinguishable.

Fiction/Literature

MARY

Nabokov’s first novel,
Mary
takes place in a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of seriocomic Russian émigrés. Lev Ganin, once a vigorous young officer, now poised between his past and his future, relives his idyllic first love affair with Mary in pre-revolutionary Russia. In stark contrast to his memories is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin’s, who, he later discovers, is Mary’s husband, temporarily separated from her by the Revolution, but expecting her arrival from Russia.

Fiction/Literature

PNIN

Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: “A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do.” Although he is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever.

Fiction/Literature

THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT

Well known as a distinguished novelist, Sebastian Knight had two secret love affairs that profoundly influenced his career, the second of which in a disastrous way. After Knight’s death, his half brother sets out to penetrate the enigma of his life, starting with a few scanty clues in the novelist’s private papers. His search proves to be a story as intriguing as any of his subject’s own novels, as baffling, and, in the end, as uniquely rewarding.

Fiction/Literature

TRANSPARENT THINGS

“
Transparent Things
revolves around the four visits of the hero—sullen, gawky Hugh Person—to Switzerland.… As a young publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride.… Eight years later—following a murder, a period of madness and a brief imprisonment—Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle out his past.… The several strands of dream, memory, and time [are] set off against the literary theorizing of R. and, more centrally, against the world of observable objects.” —Martin Amis

Fiction/Literature

THE STORIES OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales—eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time—display all the shades of Nabokov’s imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur’s samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole,
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
offers an intoxicating draft of the master’s genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.

Fiction/Literature

SPEAK, MEMORY
An Autobiography Revisited

Speak, Memory
, first published in 1951 as
Conclusive Evidence
and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including
Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, and
The Defense.

Autobiography/Literature

STRONG OPINIONS

In this collection of interviews, articles, and editorials, Nabokov ranges over his life, art, education, politics, literature, movies, and modern times, among other subjects.
Strong Opinions
offers his trenchant, witty, and always engaging views on everything from the Russian Revolution to the correct pronunciation of
Lolita.

Literary Criticism/Essays

VINTAGE NABOKOV

Novelist, poet, critic, translator, and, above all, a peerless imaginer, Vladimir Nabokov was arguably the most dazzling prose stylist of the twentieth century. A eclectic introduction to his work,
Vintage Nabokov
includes sections I-X of his most famous and controversial novel,
Lolita
; the stories “The Return of Chorb,” “The Aurelian,” “A Forgotten Poet,” “Time and Ebb,” “Signs and Symbols,” “The Vane Sisters,” and “Lance”; and chapter XII from his memoir
Speak, Memory.

Fiction/Literature

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