Bøker av Vladimir Nabokov

A novel constructed around the last great poem of a fictional American poet, John Shade, and an account of his death. The poem appears in full and the narrative develops through the lengthy, and increasingly eccentric, notes by his posthumous editor.

'Lolita is comedy, subversive yet divine ... You read Lolita sprawling limply in your chair, ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent' Martin Amis, ObserverPoet 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. 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'.

Written in mischievous and magically flowing prose, this is Nabokov's 'other' great love story; with some of Lolita's perversity and much more playfulness. Romance follows Ada and Van from their first childhood meeting through eight years of rapture, in a book which is regarded by many to be Nabokov's richest and most ambitious.

Self-satisfied, delighting in the many fascinating quirks of his own personality, Hermann Hermann is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. But then a chance meeting with a man he believes to be his double reveals a frightening 'split' in Hermann's nature. With shattering immediacy, Nabokov takes us into a deranged world, one full of an impudent, startling humour, dominated by the egotistical and scornful figure of a murderer who thinks himself an artist.

In Berlin there lived a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable and happy but one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress he loved. He was not loved in return, however, and his life ended in disaster. The original Russian text of this novel was published in 1933.

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.

'Speak, memory', said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and family hangers-on and of grand old houses in St Petersburg and the surrounding countryside in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Young love, butterflies, tutors and a multitude of other themes thread together to weave an autobiography, which is itself a work of art.Part of a major new series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and Pale Fire, in Penguin Classics.

Awarded as the Guardian Books of the Year 2014, this title tells a forty-six year-long love story.

"Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster." Thus begins Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark; this, the author tells us, is the whole story-except that he starts from here, with his characteristic dazzling skill and irony, and brilliantly turns a fable into a chilling, original novel of folly and destruction. Amidst a Weimar-era milieu of silent film stars, artists, and aspirants, Nabokov creates a merciless masterpiece as Albinus, an aging critic, falls prey to his own desires, to his teenage mistress, and to Axel Rex, the scheming rival for her affections who finds his greatest joy in the downfall of others.Published first in Russian as Kamera Obskura in 1932, this book appeared in Nabokov's own English translation six years later. This New Directions edition, based on the text as Nabokov revised it in 1960, features a new introduction by Booker Prize-winner John Banville.

Nikolai Gogol was one of the great geniuses of nineteenth century Russian literature, with a command of the irrational unmatched by any writer before or since. His strange tales, though often read as forceful demands for social change, were displays of the fantasies of the human spirit. In this ideal marriage of subject and critic, Nabokov analyses his endlessly inventive compatriot, focusing on the masterpieces Dead Souls, 'The Overcoat' and 'The Government Inspector'.Misunderstood by his contemporaries, mishandled by theatre directors and ending his life mistreated by doctors - with medicinal leeches hanging from his exceptional nose - it took Nabokov to give Gogol, 'the oddest Russian in Russia', the critical biography he and his singular, brilliant work deserve.

When Lolita was first published in 1955 it created a sensation and established Nabokov as one of the most original prose writers of the twentieth century. This annotated edition, a revised and considerably expanded version of the 1970 edition, does full justice to the textual riches of Lolita, illuminating the elaborate verbal textures and showing how they contribute to the novel's overall meaning. Alfred Appel, Jr. also provides fresh observations on the novel's artifice, games and verbal patternings and a delightful biographical vignette of Nabokov. The annotations themselves were prepared in consultation with Nabokov while newly identified allusions were confirmed by him during the final years of his life.

An autobiographical volume which recounts the story of Nabokov's first forty years up to his departure from Europe for America at the outset of World War Two. Written in this writer's characteristically brilliant, mordant style, this book is also a tender record of lost childhood and youth in pre-Revolutionary Russia.

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.This landmark new collection brings together the best of the short stories of Vladimir Nabokov, one of the twentieth century's greatest writers and author of Lolita and Pale Fire. Part of a major new series of Vladimir Nabokov's work in Penguin 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'.

Vladimir Nabokov's debut novel, Mary, is a well written story about a youthful love. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov 22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1899 - 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿), was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926-1938) while living in Berlin, where he met his wife. He achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States, where he began writing in English. Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945 and lived mostly on the East Coast before returning to Europe in 1961, where he settled in Montreux, Switzerland.From 1948 to 1959, Nabokov was a professor of Russian literature at Cornell University.Nabokov's 1955 novel Lolita ranked fourth on Modern Library's list of the 100 best 20th-century novels in 2007 and is considered one of the greatest 20th-century works of literature. Nabokov's Pale Fire, published in 1962, was ranked 53rd on the same list. His memoir, Speak, Memory, published in 1951, is considered among the greatest nonfiction works of the 20th century, placing eighth on Random House's ranking of 20th century works. Nabokov was a seven-time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. He also was an expert lepidopterist and composer of chess problems.... Nabokov is known as one of the leading prose stylists of the 20th century; his first writings were in Russian, but he achieved his greatest fame with the novels he wrote in English. As a trilingual (also writing in French, see Mademoiselle O) master, he has been compared to Joseph Conrad, but Nabokov disliked both the comparison and Conrad's work. He lamented to the critic Edmund Wilson, "I am too old to change Conradically"-which John Updike later called "itself a jest of genius". This lament came in 1941, when Nabokov had been an apprentice American for less than one year. Later, in a November 1950 letter to Wilson, Nabokov offers a solid, non-comic appraisal: "Conrad knew how to handle readymade English better than I; but I know better the other kind. He never sinks to the depths of my solecisms, but neither does he scale my verbal peaks." Nabokov translated many of his own early works into English, sometimes in collaboration with his son, Dmitri. His trilingual upbringing had a profound influence on his art. ...(wikipedia.org)

This Library of America volume is the first of three volumes presenting the most authoritative versions of the English works of the brilliant Russian émigré, Vladimir Nabokov.The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Vladimir Nabokov wrote in English, published a year after he moved to the United States, is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer's half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of a famous author. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, this novel was published in 1941.Bend Sinister (1947), Nabokov's most explicitly political novel, is the haunting, dreamlike story of Adam Krug, a quiet philosophy professor caught up in the bureaucratic bungling of a totalitarian police state. "I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer," Nabokov affirms in his introduction to the novel, but goes on to state: "There can be distinguished, no doubt, certain reflections in the glass caused by idiotic and despicable regimes that we all know and that have brushed against me in the course of my life: worlds of tyranny and torture, of Fascists and Bolshevists, of Philistine thinkers and jack-booted baboons."Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1951; revised 1966), Nabokov's dazzling memoir of his childhood in imperial Russia and exile in Europe, is central to an understanding of his art. With its balance of inner and outer worlds-of family chronicle and private fantasy, revolutions and butterflies, the games of childhood and the disasters of politics-the work that Nabokov called "a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections" is a haunting transmutation of life into art. The texts of this volume incorporate Nabokov's penciled corrections in his own copies of his works and correct long-standing errors. They are the most authoritative versions available and have been prepared with the assistance of Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist's son.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

This Library of America volume is the second of three volumes presenting the most authoritative versions of the English works of the brilliant Russian émigré, Vladimir Nabokov.Lolita (1955), Nabokov's single most famous work, is one of the most controversial and widely read books of its time. Funny, satiric, poignant, filled with allusions to earlier American writers, it is the "confession" of a middle-aged, sophisticated European émigré's passionate obsession with a twelve-year-old American "nymphet," and the story of their wanderings across a late 1940s America of highways and motels. (Nabokov's film adaptation of Lolita, as originally written for director Stanley Kubrick, is also included.)Pnin (1957) is a comic masterpiece about a gentle, bald Russian émigré professor in an American college town who is never quite able to master its language, its politics, or its train schedule. Nabokov's years as a teacher provided rich background for this satirical picture of academic life, with an unforgettable figure at its center: "It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin whose business it was to set it straight. His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence."Pale Fire (1962) is a tour de force in the form of an ostensibly autobiographical poem by a recently deceased American poet and a critical commentary by an academic who is something other than what he seems. Its unique structure, pitting artist against seemingly worshipful critic, sets the stage for some of Nabokov's most intricate games of deception and concealment.The texts of this volume incorporate Nabokov's penciled corrections in his own copies of his works which correct long-standing errors, and have been prepared with the assistance of Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist's son.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

These four plays and the two essays on drama that accompany them were written in Russian during Nabokov's emigre years in Germany and France, before his published work in English earned him his reputation as a supreme magician of language. As his son, Dmitri, reveals in the introduction, many of the Nabokovian themes that were to dazzle future generations of readers made their first appearance in these works. The title play, a five-act drama portraying the illusory hopes of the emigre community: The Event, a "dramatic comedy" set in a pre-Revolutionary Russian town: two one-act plays cast in blank verse (The Grand-dad and The Pole): and Nabokov's two essays on drama comprise an enlightening presentation of the early work of a literary genius.

Vladimir Nabokov ble født i 1899 inn i en aristokratisk familie i St. Petersburg, der forfedrene i generasjoner hadde hatt fremtredende stillinger ved tsarens hoff, i diplomatiet og høyere embetsverk. Men med revolusjonen i 1917 forsvant deres livsverden. Vladimir emigrerte til Berlin og siden til USA, der han ble en feiret romanforfatter. I erindringsboken Min europeiske ungdom tar han med leserne til Russland, den franske atlanterhavskysten og Colorados klipper. Igjen og igjen vender han tilbake til sitt tapte barndomsparadis: Han skildrer skogene ved familiegodset Vyra, guvernanter, familiemedlemmer og barndomsvenner, begynnelsen på sin livslange lidenskap for sommerfugler. Gjennom presis sansning og med suveren språkfølelse gir en av forrige århundres store mestre i denne boken et makeløst vitnesbyrd fra dramatiske perioder i europeisk historie. Time Magazine kåret Min europeiske ungdom til en av de 100 viktigste sakprosabøkene gjennom tidene. «[Nabokov] har kledd historiske datas nakne bein med morsomme anekdoter og en fortryllende stil som gjør Min europeiske ungdom til en konstant glede å lese.» Harper's

First publication of an index-card diary in which Nabokov recorded sixty-four dreams and subsequent daytime episodes, allowing the reader a glimpse of his innermost life.

'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.

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- migr s. 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.