"Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." -- John Updike The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a perversely magical literary detective story -- subtle, intricate, leading to a tantalizing climax -- about the mysterious life of a famous writer. Many people knew things about …
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories is a collection of thirteen short stories by Vladimir Nabokov. All were written in Russian by Nabokov between 1923 and 1940 as an expatriate in Berlin, Paris, and other places in western Europe. They appeared individually in the Russian émigré press. Subsequently, they were …
The Gift is Vladimir Nabokov's final Russian novel, and is considered to be his farewell to the world he was leaving behind. Nabokov wrote it between 1935 and 1937 while living in Berlin, and it was published in serial form under his nom de plume, Vladimir Sirin. The Gift's fourth chapter, a pseudo-biography of the …