Terra Incognita

Terra Incognita

Summary

'The woods were gradually thinning. I was tormented by strange hallucinations.I gazed at the weird tree trunks, around some of which were coiled thick, flesh-coloured snakes; suddenly I thought I saw, between the trunks, as though through my fingers, the mirror of a half-open wardrobe...'

These three stories of menace, magic and melancholy display Vladimir Nabokov's astonishing range and inventiveness. Whether describing an escape across a surreal tropical landscape, a fateful meeting or an unexpected - and threatening - return, each tale shows his dazzling sleight of hand, intellectual playfulness and fantastical imagination.

This book includes Terra Incognita, Spring in Fialta and The Doorbell.

About the author

Vladimir Nabokov

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.
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