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Carlo Rovelli on Nabokov's butterfly expertise

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Vladimir Nabokov: novelist, poet… esteemed butterfly scientist?

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Six unusual families from the classics

Revenge

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 
 
‘And this is fantasy, the flutter, the rapture of fantasy!’ 
 
A bashful dragon, a lost wood-sprite, the prophet Elijah and the Devil disguised as a middle-aged woman appear in these playful, exuberant stories by Vladimir Nabokov. So do a vengeful husband, a barber confronting his torturer and the author himself, as he recalls his first love. Each of the thirteen tales here enchants and enraptures us, only to gleefully confound our expectations.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.

‘And this is fantasy, the flutter, the rapture of fantasy!’ 
 
A bashful dragon, a lost wood-sprite, the prophet Elijah and the Devil disguised as a middle-aged woman appear in these playful, exuberant stories by Vladimir Nabokov. So do a vengeful husband, a barber confronting his torturer and the author himself, as he recalls his first love. Each of the thirteen tales here enchants and enraptures us, only to gleefully confound our expectations.

The Defense

Vladimir Nabokov's early novel is the dazzling story of the coarse, strange yet oddly endearing chess-playing genius Luzhin. 
 
Discovering his prodigious gift in boyhood and rising to the rank of International Grandmaster, Luzhin develops a lyrical passion for chess that renders the real world a phantom. As he confronts the fiery, swift-swooping Italian Grandmaster Turati, he brings into play his carefully devised defence. Making masterly play of metaphor and imagery, The Defense is the book that, of his early works, Nabokov felt 'contains and diffuses the greatest warmth'.

Vladimir Nabokov (Author) 
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.

Vladimir Nabokov's early novel is the dazzling story of the coarse, strange yet oddly endearing chess-playing genius Luzhin. Discovering his prodigious gift in boyhood and rising to the rank of International Grandmaster, Luzhin develops a lyrical passion for chess that renders the real world a phantom. As he confronts the fiery, swift-swooping Italian Grandmaster Turati, he brings into play his carefully devised defence. Making masterly play of metaphor and imagery, The Defense is the book that, of his early works, Nabokov felt 'contains and diffuses the greatest warmth'.

Pnin

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Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched at the heart of an American campus. Battling with American life and language, Pnin must face great hazards in this new world: the ruination of his beautiful lumber-room-as-office; the removal of his teeth and the fitting of new ones; the search for a suitable boarding house; and the trials of taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has yet to master. 
 
Wry, intelligent and moving, Pnin reveals the absurd and affecting story of one man in exile.

Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched at the heart of an American campus. Battling with American life and language, Pnin must face great hazards in this new world: the ruination of his beautiful lumber-room-as-office; the removal of his teeth and the fitting of new ones; the search for a suitable boarding house; and the trials of taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has yet to master.

Lolita

Vladimir Nabakov's shocking masterpiece, now in a beautifully designed clothbound edition 
 
'Lolita is comedy, subversive yet divine' Martin Amis 
 
Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A tortured soul or a monster? Humbert Humbert's seduction is one of many dimensions in Nabokov's dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures. Filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 starring James Mason and Peter Sellers, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne starring Jeremy Irons and Melanie Griffith, Lolita has lost none of its power to shock and awe.

Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these? Humbert Humbert's seduction is one of many dimensions in Nabokov's dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures.

Nabokov's Dozen

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith 
 
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. 
 
Thirteen ingeniously crafted stories make up Vladimir Nabokov's baker's dozen. In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, with nowhere to escape. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can be snatched, waylay their victims. Like the shimmer of the sea, the gleam of a glass caught by the sun, these stories sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve again.

Thirteen ingeniously crafted stories make up Vladimir Nabokov's baker's dozen. In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, with nowhere to escape. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can be snatched, waylay their victims. Like the shimmer of the sea, the gleam of a glass caught by the sun, these stories sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve again.

Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor

Think, Write, Speak

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'Masterly, hilarious, truly insightful' - Philip Hensher, The Spectator 
 
 A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2019 
 
 The last major collection of Nabokov's published material, Think, Write, Speak brings together a treasure trove of previously uncollected texts from across the author's extraordinary career. 
 
 Each phase of his wandering life is included, from a precocious essay written while still at Cambridge in 1921, through his fame in the aftermath of the publication of Lolita to the final, fascinating interviews given shortly before his death in 1977. 
 
 Introduced and edited by his biographer Brian Boyd, this is an essential work for anyone who has been drawn into Nabokov's literary orbit. Here he is at his most inspirational, curious, playful, misleading and caustic. The seriousness of his aesthetic credo, his passion for great writing and his mix of delight and dismay at his own, sudden global fame in the 1950s are all brilliantly delineated.

For those of us who are Vladimir Nabokov completists perhaps we finally have closure ... Now we have the full Nabokovian ex cathedra pronouncements in all their typical vim and vigour.

Masterly, hilarious, truly insightful ... Vladimir Nabokov's views are of compelling interest - paradoxically, because he regularly insisted that his novels sent no message, made no moral case and presented no argument ... His non-fiction stands up astonishingly well.

The writer's genius for nailing a subject in a sentence lives on in his stinging reviews and defensive interviews.

A fuller, and maybe truer, image of Nabokov ... The greatest pleasure in reading this book is the impression you get that you're opening your presents underneath the Christmas tree ... A lovely blend of literary elements and of personal details pertaining to Nabokov: you experience intellectual marvel when you detect the premises of a famous quote or a literary pattern, and you feel particular pleasure when you get a glimpse of the man hiding behind the famous writer and becoming suddenly relatable.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
Brian Boyd, University Distinguished Professor of English, University of Auckland, has long been associated with the work of Vladimir Nabokov, as annotator, bibliographer, biographer, critic, editor, translator and more. His works have appeared in nineteen languages and won awards on four continents. 
 
Anastasia Tolstoy, a junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, holds a doctorate from Oxford, where she completed a DPhil on Vladimir Nabokov and the Aesthetics of Disgust. She is the co-translator, with Thomas Karshan, of Nabokov's neo-Shakespearean blank verse drama The Tragedy of Mister Morn.

The last major collection of Nabokov's published material, Think, Write, Speak brings together a treasure trove of previously uncollected texts from across the author's extraordinary career. Each phase of his wandering life is included, from a precocious essay written while still at Cambridge in 1921, through to his fame in the aftermath of the publication of Lolita to the final, fascinating interviews given shortly before his death in 1977. 
 
 Introduced and edited by his biographer Brian Boyd, this is an essential work for anyone who has been drawn into Nabokov's literary orbit. Here he is at his most inspirational, curious, misleading and caustic. The seriousness of his aesthetic credo, his passion for great writing and his mix of delight and dismay at his own, sudden global fame in the 1950s are all brilliantly delineated here.

Lance

'The illegible signature of teetering disaster' 
 
Three great stories--The Aurelian, Signs and Symbols and Lance--the last both a derisive attack on science-fiction and an attempt to imagine the real pain and horror that would accompany space travel. 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Thirteen Stories

Thirteen strangely wrought, ingeniously crafted stories make up  Nabokov's baker's dozen. In some of these stories shadowy people pass  through, cooped up by life,  with nowhere to escape to. Their dreams lie  stifled,  smothered by routine and repetition, and frustrations lurk in  all the  corners. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness,  which  flutter away before they can be snatched, waylay their victims.  Like the  shimmer of the sea, the gleam of a glass caught by the sun,  they  sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve again.

At their best they display a Lawrentian power of evocation, a Proustian depth of subtlty, sadness and loss

In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, mangled by it, with nowhere to escape to. Their dreams lie stifled, smothered by routine and repetition, and frustrations lurk in all the corners. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can be snatched, waylay their victims. Like the shimmer of the sea, the gleam of a glass caught by the sun, they sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve again. 
 
Two of the stories, 'First Love' and 'Mademoiselle O', are autobiographical, and 'The Assistant Producer' is based on real events, but the rest are pure flights of fantasy - or the stuff that life is weaved of?

King, Queen, Knave

'Vladimir Nabokov was a literary genius' David Lodge 
 
'Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest', Nabokov wrote of King, Queen, Knave. Comic, sensual and cerebral, it dramatizes an Oedipal love triangle, a tragi-comedy of husband, wife and lover, through Dreyer the rich businessman, his ripe-lipped ad mercenary wife Martha, and their bespectacled nephew Franz. 'If a resolute Freudian manages to slip in' - Nabokov darts a glance to the reader - 'he or she should be warned that a number of cruel traps have been set here and there...

'Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest', Nabokov wrote of King, Queen, Knave. Comic, sensual and cerebral, it dramatizes an Oedipal love triangle, a tragi-comedy of husband, wife and lover, through Dreyer the rich businessman, his ripe-lipped ad mercenary wife Martha, and their bespectacled nephew Franz. 'If a resolute Freudian manages to slip in' - Nabokov darts a glance to the reader - 'he or she should be warned that a number of cruel traps have been set here and there...

Look at the Harlequins!

'He did us all an honour by electing to use, and transform, our language' Anthony Burgess 
 
'Look at the harlequins ... Play! Invent the world! Invent reality'. 
 
This is the childhood advice given by an aunt to Russian born writer Vadim Vadimovich, who emigrates to England, then Paris, then Germany and then the US, and, now dying, reconstructs his past. He remembers Iris his first wife, Annette his long-necked typist and Bel his daughter, as well as his own bizarre 'numerical nimbus syndrome'.

'Look at the harlequins ... Play! Invent the world! Invent reality'.  This is the childhood advice given by an aunt to Russian born writer Vadim Vadimovich, who emigrates to England, then Paris, then Germany and then the US, and, now dying, reconstructs his past. He remembers Iris his first wife, Annette his long-necked typist and Bel his daughter, as well as his own bizarre 'numerical nimbus syndrome'.

The Eye

Smurov, a fussily self-conscious Russian tutor, shoots himself after a humiliating beating by his mistress' husband. Unsure whether his suicide has been successful or not, Smurov drifts around Berlin, observing his acquaintances, but finds he can discover very little about his own life from the opinions of his distracted, confused fellow-émigrés. Nabokov's shortest novel, The Eye is both a satirical detective story and a wonderfully layered exploration of identity, appearance and the loss of self in a world of word-play and confusion.

Mary

'Nabokov can move you to laughter in the way that masters can - to laughter that is near to tears' Guardian 
 
Lev Ganin is a young officer sharing a boarding house in Berlin with a host of Russian émigrés. Alone in his room, he dreams of his first love, Mary. Awash with memories of youth and idyllic scenes of pre-Revolution Russia, Ganin becomes convinced that Mary is in fact the wife of a fellow-boarder, due to arrive at this very house soon. He longs for her arrival, when he can whisk her away and leave everything behind ...

Lev Ganin is a young officer sharing a boarding house in Berlin with a host of Russian émigrés. Alone in his room, he dreams of his first love, Mary. Awash with memories of youth and idyllic scenes of pre-Revolution Russia, Ganin becomes convinced that Mary is in fact the wife of a fellow-boarder, due to arrive at this very house soon. He longs for her arrival, when he can whisk her away and leave everything behind ...

Collected Poems

The poems are coy, clever, sophisticated, sonorous and worldly. In other words, Nabokovian

These masterly poems span the decades of Nabokov's career, from 'Music', written in 1914, to the short, playful 'To Vera', composed in 1974. 'The University Poem', one of Nabokov's major poetic works, is here in English for the first time: an extraordinary autobiographical poem looking back at his time at Cambridge, with its dinners, girls and memories, it is suffused with rich description, wit and verbal dexterity. Included too are the surreally comic 'A Literary Dinner', the enchanting, 'Eve', the wryly humorous 'An Evening of Russian Poetry' and a meditation on the act of creation, 'Tolstoy', as well as verse written on America, lepidoptery, sport, love and Nabokov's Russian homeland.

Transparent Things

The darkly comic Transparent Things, one of Nabokov's final books, traces the bleak life of Hugh Person through murder, madness, prison and trips to Switzerland. One of these was the last journey his father ever took; on another, having been sent to ingratiate himself with a distinguished novelist, he met his future wife. Nabokov's brilliant short novel sinks into the transparent things of the world that surround this one Person, to the silent histories they carry. 
 
Remarkable even in Nabokov's work for its depth and lyricism, Transparent Things is a small, experimental marvel of memories and dreams, both sentimental and malign.

The Enchanter

Nabokov described this novella, written in Paris in 1939 but only published twenty years later, as 'the first little throb of Lolita'. The plot is similar: a middle-aged man wedding an unattractive widow in order to indulge his paedophilic obsession with her daughter. 
 
However, The Enchanter has an utterly different atmosphere, as time, place and even names remain a mystery. Nabokov transforms his protagonist's attempts to lull his twelve-year-old step-daughter into a state of 'enchantment' into a graceful, chilling fairytale.

Glory

'In general Glory is my happiest thing.' 'The fun of Glory is . . . to be sought in the echoing and linking of minor events, in back-and-forth switches, which produce an illusion of impetus; in an old daydream directly becoming the blessing of the ball hugged to one's chest, or in the casual vision of Martin's mother grieving beyond the time-frame of the novel in an abstraction of the future that the reader can only guess at, even after he has raced through the last seven chapters where a regular madness of structural twists and a masquerade of all characters culminate in a furious finale, although nothing much happens at the very end - just a bird perching on a wicket in the greyness of a wet day' - Vladimir Nabokov

Laughter in the Dark

Albinus - rich, married middle-aged and respectable - is an art critic and aspiring filmmaker who lusts after the coquettish young cinema usherette Margot. Gradually he seduces her and convinces himself he is irresistible to her, but Margot has other plans. She wants to be a film star, and when Albinus introduces her to the American movie producer Axel Rex, she sees her chance - and plotting, duplicity and tragedy ensue.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Spurred on by admiration for his novelist half-brother and irritation at the biography written about him by Mr Goodman ('his slapdash and very misleading book'), the narrator, V, sets out to record Sebastian Knight's life as he understands it. But buried amid the extensive quoting, digressions, seeming explanations and digs, Sebastian's erratic and troubled persona remains as elusive as ever. 
 
Nabokov's first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a nuanced, enigmatic potrayal of the conflict between the real and the unreal, and the futile quest for human truth.

Vladimir Nabokov (Author) 
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
John Lanchester (Afterword by) 
John Lanchester is a journalist, novelist and winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New Yorker, with a monthly column in Esquire. John was raised in South-East Asia and now lives in London.

The Gift

The Gift is the phantasmal autobiography of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev, a writer living in the closed world of Russian intellectuals in Berlin shortly after the First World War. This gorgeous tapestry of literature and butterflies tells the story of Fyodor's pursuits as a writer. Its heroine is not Fyodor's elusive and beloved Zina, however, but Russian prose and poetry themselves.

The Gift is the phantasmal autobiography of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev, a writer living in the closed world of Russian intellectuals in Berlin shortly after the First World War. This gorgeous tapestry of literature and butterflies tells the story of Fyodor's pursuits as a writer. Its heroine is not Fyodor's elusive and beloved Zina, however, but Russian prose and poetry themselves.

Collected Stories

A man at his desk is interrupted by the appearance of a woodland elf in his room; the piano maestro Bachmann ends his career; a barber shaves the face of a man who once tortured him; a shy dreamer makes a deal with the Devil. In these sixty-five stories of magic and melancholy, Nabokov displays an astonishing range of inventiveness, with dazzling sleight of hand, fantastical fairy tales, intellectual games and enchanting glimpses into lives of ambiguity and loss. 
 
The collection displays Nabokov's astonishing range of technical and formal inventiveness: the dazzling sleight of hand, fanciful fairy tales, ingenious puzzles, enchanting vignettes and haunting melancholic narratives full of disturbing ambiguities.

Vladimir Nabokov

A brilliant and challenging masterpiece by a magician of language, Vladimir Nabokov’s convoluted story of a love “troubled by incest” that binds two generations of an eccentric family is also an innocent tale of childish affection and a meditation on the nature of time.

A gorgeous display of narrative wizardry, at once opulent, erotic, playful and wise.

A great work of art, a necessary book, radiant and rapturous…provides further evidence that he is a peer of Kafka, Proust, and Joyce.

or Ardor

This story of a man’s lifelong entanglement with his sister is not only a love story; it manages also to be a fairy tale, an epic, a philosophical treatise on the nature of time, a parody of the history of the novel, and an erotic catalogue. It concludes with an ingenious appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom. Ada, published just after Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, is the supreme work of a virtuosic imagination at white heat. 
 
Nabokov is the most allusive and linguistically playful writer in English since Joyce, and like Pale Fire and Lolita, this novel abounds in delightful minor parodies and pastiches, countless multilingual puns and literary jokes. 
 
Ada is at its core a love story, the stuff that’s sold reams of pop music, and piles of books. Van, fourteen, falls in love with twelve-year-old Ada during a summer holiday. This premise is possibly the only aspect of Ada common to numerous other novels. Van, an unreliable narrator if there ever was one, tells the story, while the narrative shuttles seamlessly from a first person to a third person - trust Nabokov the Enchanter to achieve that trick.

Vladimir Nabokov

Praise for Ada

A brilliant and challenging masterpiece by a magician of language, Vladimir Nabokov’s convoluted story of a love “troubled by incest” that binds two generations of an eccentric family is also an innocent tale of chi ...

A gorgeous display of narrative wizardry, at once opulent, erotic, playful and wise.

A great work of art, a necessary book, radiant and rapturous…provides further evidence that he is a peer of Kafka, Proust, and Joyce.

A brilliant and challenging masterpiece by a magician of language, Vladimir Nabokov’s convoluted story of a love “troubled by incest” that binds two generations of an eccentric family is also an innocent tale of chi ...

A gorgeous display of narrative wizardry, at once opulent, erotic, playful and wise.

A great work of art, a necessary book, radiant and rapturous…provides further evidence that he is a peer of Kafka, Proust, and Joyce.

A brilliant and challenging masterpiece by a magician of language, Vladimir Nabokov’s convoluted story of a love “troubled by incest” that binds two generations of an eccentric family is also an innocent tale of chi ...

A gorgeous display of narrative wizardry, at once opulent, erotic, playful and wise.

A great work of art, a necessary book, radiant and rapturous…provides further evidence that he is a peer of Kafka, Proust, and Joyce.

Books by Vladimir Nabokov

Articles featuring Vladimir Nabokov

The Penguin books that ignited a pop culture phenomenon

Vladimir Nabokov: novelist, poet… esteemed butterfly scientist?

Six unusual families from the classics

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