Lermontov, and Tiutchev

A Hero of Our Time (Mikhail Lermontov)

The Song of Igor's Campaign (Anon.)

Eugene Onegin (Alexander Pushkin)

LETTERS.

The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence between

Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 19401971

Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 19401977

MISCELLANEOUS.

Poems and Problems

The Annotated Lolita

ALSO BY Alfred Appel, Jr.

Nabokov (co-editor)

Nabokov's Dark Cinema

Signs of Life

Witching Times (editor)

The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West, 19221972

(co-editor)

The Art of Celebration

ALSO BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV.

ADA, OR ARDOR.

Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. But more: it is also at once a fairy tale, an epic, and a philosophical treatise on the nature of time; a parody of the history of the novel; and an erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat.

Fiction/Literature BEND SINISTER.

Filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, Bend Sinister is a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man. In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, Paduk's government attempts to co-opt Krug's support in order to validate the new regime.

Fiction/Literature INVITATION TO A BEHEADING.

In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude," an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When he is led out to be executed, he simply wills his executioners out of existence, and they and the whole world disappear.

Fiction/Literature THE DEFENSE.

As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, an enigma to his parents, and an object of ridicule to his classmates. Taking up chess, he prodigiously rises to the rank of grandmaster, but in Luzhin's obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality. His own world falls apart during a crucial championship match, when his intricate defense withers under his opponent's unexpected and unpredictable lines of assault.

Fiction/Literature THE ENCHANTER.

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 emigre 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 emigre 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 emigre 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 emigres. 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.