Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting

Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting
Author: Gerard de Vries
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2006
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9789053567906

Studie van de verwijzingen naar beeldende kunst in het werk van de Russisch-Amerikaanse schrijver (1899-1977).

The Five Senses in Nabokov's Works

The Five Senses in Nabokov's Works
Author: Marie Bouchet
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2020-06-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030454061

This collection of essays focuses on a subject largely neglected in Nabokovian criticism—the importance and significance of the five senses in Vladimir Nabokov’s work, poetics, politics and aesthetics. This text analyzes the crucial role of the author’s synesthesia and multilingualism in relation to the five senses, as well as the sensual and erotic dimensions of sensoriality in his works. Each chapter provides a highly focused and sometimes provocative approach to the unique role that sensory perceptions play in the shaping and narrating of Nabokov’s memories and in his creative process.

Nabokov at the Limits

Nabokov at the Limits
Author: Lisa Zunshine
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1135658773

The eleven contributors to this volume investigate the connections between Nabokov's output and the fields of painting, music, and ballet.

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov
Author: Neil Cornwell
Publisher: Northcote House Pub Limited
Total Pages: 162
Release: 1999
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 074630868X

Vladimir Nabokov's extraordinary literary career, as a master of Russian and English prose, is unique. Acclaimed in the limited Russian emigre 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. 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.

Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading

Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading
Author: Julian W. Connolly
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1997
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780810112711

In an unnamed dream country, Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition. After spending his last days in jail, he simply wills his executioners out of existence.

Nabokov in Motion

Nabokov in Motion
Author: Yuri Leving
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2022-02-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501386557

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.

Authorship in Nabokov’s Prefaces

Authorship in Nabokov’s Prefaces
Author: Jacqueline Hamrit
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2015-01-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1443873020

Whereas literary criticism has mainly oscillated between “the death of the author” (Barthes) and “the return of the author” (Couturier), this work suggests another perspective on authorship through an analysis of Nabokov’s prefaces. It is here argued that the author, being neither dead nor tyrannical, alternates between authoritative apparitions and receding disappearances in the double gesture of mastery without mastery which Derrida calls ‘exappropriation’, that is, a simultaneous attempt to appropriate one’s work, control it, have it under one’s power and expropriate it, losing control by loosening one’s grip. The intention of this is to approach, through one’s experience of reading and interpreting, the experience of self-effacement and impersonality pertaining to writing (cf. Blanchot). Prefaces are considered to be suitable places for the deconstruction of the classical image of Nabokov’s arrogance through the unearthing of his reserve and vulnerability. This work provides an account of the mere intuition (which, therefore, does not pretend to be a conclusive and definitive interpretation) of another image of Nabokov whose undeniable talent for deception seems in accordance with a need for discretion and secrecy.

Charlottengrad

Charlottengrad
Author: Roman Utkin
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2023-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299344401

As many as half a million Russians lived in Germany in the 1920s, most of them in Berlin, clustered in and around the Charlottenburg neighborhood to such a degree that it became known as “Charlottengrad.” Traditionally, the Russian émigré community has been understood as one of exiles aligned with Imperial Russia and hostile to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet government that followed. However, Charlottengrad embodied a full range of personal and political positions vis-à-vis the Soviet project, from enthusiastic loyalty to questioning ambivalence and pessimistic alienation. By closely examining the intellectual output of Charlottengrad, Roman Utkin explores how community members balanced their sense of Russianness with their position in a modern Western city charged with artistic, philosophical, and sexual freedom. He highlights how Russian authors abroad engaged with Weimar-era cultural energies while sustaining a distinctly Russian perspective on modernist expression, and follows queer Russian artists and writers who, with their German counterparts, charted a continuous evolution in political and cultural attitudes toward both the Weimar and Soviet states. Utkin provides insight into the exile community in Berlin, which, following the collapse of the tsarist government, was one of the earliest to face and collectively process the peculiarly modern problem of statelessness. Charlottengrad analyzes the cultural praxis of “Russia Abroad” in a dynamic Berlin, investigating how these Russian émigrés and exiles navigated what it meant to be Russian—culturally, politically, and institutionally—when the Russia they knew no longer existed.