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Awe and exhileration - along with heartbreak and mordant wit - abound in Lolita The authors most famos novel, a story of obsession and passion. ... Read more

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Vladimir Nabokov was always a controversial writer. Long before the furore that attended the publication of Lolita, controversy raged over the virtues of his work. His detractors insisted that, although he wrote nine Russian novels, he had forsaken the humanistic concerns of the Russian literary tradition, while his supporters claimed that his work actually extended and enriched that tradition. David Rampton faces these apparent contradictions head on and, adopting a more detached, critical perspective than is usually found in writing on Nabokov, he tries to reach a more balanced, integrated view of the novelist's achievement. Rampton assembles evidence from Nabokov's own critical writings to show that the relationship of art to human life is central to Nabokov's work. He pursues this argument through a close reading of novels from different stages of Nabokov's career. What emerges is a provocative and stimulating revaluation of Nabokov that will interest any serious student of twentieth-century literature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Review for Vladimir Nabokov by David Rampton
I read this book when I had my military training. I must admit that it really gave me much fun and I found fantastic items in those not so famous Nabokov novels such as Mary that I had not seen before. But to most expertised Nabokovians it provides less information than it should have. ... Read more

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Lolita, la más famosa y controversial novela de Vladimir Nabokov, cuenta la historia de la obsesión devoradora del cuarentón Humbert Humbert por la nínfula Dolores Haze. Ternura y fascinación —además de tristeza y un humor mordaz— llenan sus páginas pero es, por encima de todo, una meditación sobre el amor—el amor como abuso y alucinación, locura y transformación. ... Read more

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The Most Beautiful Novel Ever Written
An account of pathological love so tender that it has no rival in literature. A dreamlike plot and dream-exquisite prose: perfection.

14-year-old loved boook
Im 14 years old and I thought that the book was well written. This book is an instand classic. I saw the movie and right after i rushed to get the book and i really felt like i was in it. This book deserves 6 stars!! ... Read more

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Problems Applauded
I have to respectfully disagree with the previous reviewer.I haven't read the poems, but I've worked on the problems on-line.They are anything but easy.I have found them devilish, elegant, challenging, and confounding.Of course, I admit that everything's relative.I'm not a tournament player; I play purely recreationally.However, I suspect that even if you are a strong player and can solve the problems with much less effort than I, you'll appreciate their ingenuity and originality.

middle of the road
nabokov, while being a superb writer of fiction, isn't the best poet there is. i'm not saying the poems in this collection were bad, just nothing spectacular. (the chess problems on the other hand were a joke, way too easy)

which is a shame because, like many other fiction writers, he found great dissapointment in the world not viewing him as a poet. but, once again, it's because he didn't produce that many stellar poems. it was interesting to see a well-known translator translate his own work. it has to bring something new to the world of translation. i wonder if it has any special problems... ... Read more

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The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic.While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. It is first and foremost a compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up 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, the government attempts to co-opt Krug's support in order to validate the new regime. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (20)

It doesn't work
Now here is a novel which I was really looking forward to reading. I've never read Nabokov before, but I had learned that this tale is about a nameless totalitarian state and the corruption of an intellectual within it (a plot not dissimilar to Thomas Keneally's "The Tyrant's Novel"). Thus it combines a fascinating theme with the reputation of a great writer.

What's the earliest you have ever given up on a book? My record is page 40. That would be page 40 of "Bend Sinister". And if you are wondering why, consider the following prose samples:

"The lights of the thither side were nearing in a shudder of concentric prickly iridescent circles, dwindling again to a blurred glow when you blinked, and extravagantly expanding immediately afterwards. He was a big heavy man. He felt an immediate connection to the black lacquered water lapping and heaving under the stone arches of the bridge."
[p. 16]

This kind of thing happens a lot in "Bend Sinister". Sweeping, languid over-description followed by an abrupt change of subject (or register) and then a grandly mysterious statement that might - or might not - mean something.

The following is not dialogue, just Nabokov:

"In the course of our, let me see, twelve, twelve and three months, years of life together, I ought to have immobilized by this simple method millions of moments; paying perhaps terrific fines, but stopping the train. Say, why did you do it? the popeyed conductor might ask. Because I liked the view."
[p. 17]

That such concentrated awfulness can be found within two consecutive pages of this novel is quite alarming. But the errors are not merely of style. Try the following:

"He thought of going out to mail his letter as bachelors are wont to do around eleven o'clock at night."
[p. 34]

Does this sentence mean that:
1. At around eleven o'clock he thought of going out?
2. He thought at some earlier time of going out at eleven o'clock?
3. Bachelors are wont to go out around eleven o'clock?

It's remarkable to find such syntactical confusion and garbled sense compacted into a single line of prose.

Yet even when the prose abominations are confined to just a phrase, examples are plentiful. Who - apart from a schoolboy clumsily trying to impress his English teacher - would refer to the moon as "our siliceous satellite"? [p. 19] Who would feel the necessity to invent a metaphor for the red rear reflector of a bicycle - and then call it an "anal ruby"? [p. 19] Who would paint the tenderness of lovers with the expression "her concavity fitting my convexity exactly"? [p. 30]

This is Nabokov's first novel in the English language, but he frequently throws in long sentences of untranslated French, presumably for fear that he was expressing himself too clearly. When Arthur Koestler (who wrote quite a bit about totalitarian regimes) looked back upon his first book in the English language, he had the following to say in the preface to a revised edition:

"Some pages now appear insufferably maudlin: others are studded with cliches, which, at the time, however, seemed original discoveries to the innocent explorer of a new language-continent ... I have confined myself to correcting only the most glaring gallicisms, germanisms and grammatical errors - and to throwing out adjectives and similes at a set rate of one in five."
["Scum of the Earth", p.7/8]

The spirit which informs this passage - caution with a new language; economy of description; intellectual modesty - is the exact opposite of the spirit of Nabokov's prose. "Bend Sinister" comes across as gloriously self-impressed. Yet in reality the book is an unreadable rubble-heap of rookie mistakes, forced flair and random thought. No amount of faux-literary excuse-making on the part of Nabokov's defenders can hide a plot that fails to start or a sequence of self-indulgent interpolations which impart no information to the reader.

So - what reader will search for an allegory, a moral or a theme in such a junkyard of prose? Not I. (And not beyond page 40.)

An Historic Satire?
The reason that farce survives and satire doesn't is that farce is silliness and satire is comparative.When what you satirize disappears so does the satire.Nabokov's novel is a satire of the fascist/communist state and those who run it.Those who have never lived under either state cannot understand how biting the satire is having nothing to compare it to.

That this book was written in 1947 but not published until 1960 is because it became outdated in 1945 with the end of WW2 (unless you want to compare it to Fascist Spain which few knew about).That the book was published at all is due to Nabokov's notoriety (i.e. Lolita) and in some ways mirrors the main character Adam Krug.Krug himself muses that he is not as smart or incisive as he is made out to be but is a projection of those who have "puffed him up".His disciples (in other countries) spout rhetoric that he claims are not "remotely akin to his style or temper"; Nabokov seems to be encapsulating what happened to Nietzsche.

There are chapters, sections and monologues that are nothing but long puns and plays on words and theories that add nothing to the story but to fill up pages.Sought of like a students paper that's too short and need to be filled out with any material handy.As this was the second book written by Nabokov in English, it was as if he was using this to perfect his language skills and never planned to have it published.

The story itself is that of a man trying to avoid the times he lives in.He is a member of a society of which he doesn't approve but will do nothing about it until it effects him personally.He feels invulnerable because of his 'worldwide acclaim' though the current regime refuses to let him emigrate.Nothing effects him, the arrest of his colleagues or the closing of his university, until his son is killed.Then he realizes that he can't run or hide from the society he lives in by ignoring it.Those who live in Ivy covered towers, have been known to get thrown out the windows of those towers.

For today this book rates a two, from it's historical perspective it rates a three as an exercise in the '1984' school of criticism.It would be interesting to know if this was written before or after the publication of '1984' or if they were written simultaneously.

Zeb Kantrowitz

Love and Madness in a Totalitarian State
BEND SINISTER begins with Adam Krug, a famous philosopher, attempting to cross a bridge at night in a police state. That bridge, which is Krug's route from the hospital where his wife has just died to his apartment where his young son David waits for his Daddy, is guarded by soldiers, who are bungling, officious, and sinister as they review Krug's papers. While Nabokov adds many layers to this first disturbing scene, the dynamic of BEND SINISTER is set in chapter one. Stated as a question, this is: What happens in the interplay between a brilliant but aloof man, death and depression, love for an innocent child, and official incompetence and brutality?

Madness is an important element of BEND SINISTER. On one side, this emanates from the government where Paduk, its dictator, has used an ideology that celebrates mediocrity to create an arbitrary and brutal police state. On the other side, there is the slowly developing madness of Krug, whose character gradually evolves from uncompromising brilliance to a boyish recklessness, which has unintentionally cruel consequences.

As with other Nabokov books, the text is laced with brilliant precision that brings remarkable clarity and insight to the writing. At the same, this novel features Nabokov's odd overlap of humor and cruelty, which is also visible in Pnin (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) and Lolita. In this case, Nabokov endows the police with a quality of lustful silliness, as they torment and arrest their victims. This truly enriches the work, since the arrests in BEND SINISTER would otherwise only be displays of helpless panic and ruthlessness.

Highly recommended.

A key to Nabokov's oeuvre
While certainly no casual reader should be introduced to Nabokov via this book, Bend Sinister is essential reading for anyone who has experienced two or three of his other novels and wants to dig deeper. Thematically, Bend Sinister is a reprise of his Russian novel Invitation to a Beheading, as a man goes up against a cruelly totalitarian state, only to sense that its horrors may all be an illusion as he inches closer to madness. But, where the overtly Kafka-esque Invitation only hinted at it's meaning, the final pages of Bend Sinister give it all away, as a madman in a cell sees the image of a writer at work in his study, and a moth flutters at a screen. For Nabokov, all literary works are creations of the authorial God, and he thus suggests our own relationship to our world, fleetingly revealed in little patterns of coincidence, in moments of madness, or in tiny windows to the beyond such as the sky reflected in a puddle of water, bisected by a bend sinister. Later, in Ada, Nabokov would again make explicit this "alternative" fictional universe by conflating geography and technology in that novel's Anti-Terra, and he would again in Transparent Things with Hugh (You's) relationship with the godlike R. (an inverse of the "I" in the Cyrillic alphabet). But Nabokov really tips his hand in two places: Shade's poem in Pale Fire and here in Bend Sinister. If you want the key to unlocking the secrets of Nabokov masterpieces like Pale Fire or The Gift, look no further.

Curlicue Oblique
A more masterfully oblique narrative structure than what Nabokov accomplishes in Bend Sinister would be hard to imagine, short of James Joyce. Don't let that comparison scare you off, however! For all its complexity, Bend Sinister is thrillingly immediate and engrossing, a "page turner" rather than a foot-note finder.

Embedded in the wild allusions and tipsy imagery of Nabokov's hyper-English, there's a heart-stopping narrative, the story of Adam Krug, an intellectual grizzly of a man, whose wife has just died and who struggles torescue himself from mental and his son from actual catastrophe. That personal drama unfolds within the larger struggle of Krug, the man of genius, to maintain his detachment from the tyranny of "mass man" established in his fictional country by his abominableformer schoolmate, Paduk the Toad. Paduk's overweening urge is to suborn Krug to his will, and for a creature of the lowest cunning, Paduk has resources of nearly comic-book unreality. Krug's resistance, morally superior at every point, curlicues ever deeper into nightmarish negation.

It's inexplicable to me what a leap of levels of magnitude Nabokov's sheer stylistic mastery took, from his very fine novels in Russian to his incomparable novels in English. Bend Sinister was his first novel published in America after six years of residence. Shall we just proclaim that the wealth of literary resources of the English language offered Nabokov a richer medium? That sounds like chauvinism, but how else can such a transformation be explained?

The narration of Bend Sinister occurs in a "no one else's land" tilting between stream-of-consciousness and the Omniscient Narrator, with the changes of voice craftily muted until the very final chapter, when the 'author' reveals his omnipotence. Krug's streaming consciousness shifts without warning from wakeful planning to fateful dreaming, and within the surreality of Paduk's tyranny it's nearly impossible to delimit real horrors amid unimaginable villainies. Odd intrusions of Slavic and Germanic languages (in parentheses) intensify this obliquity of narrative, as if the "author" feels compelled to translate Krug's imagery back into his proper linguistic cognition. As the action-drama of Krug's struggle to save his son slithers into hideous sadism, the competing languages lose their boundaries in a parenthetical chaos. And then our "author" mercifully intervenes... from the sensory devastation of Krug's mind we slip into the polished poetry of the author's, at his writing table, playing with a moth.

Bend Sinister has been taken to be Nabokov's "most overtly political" novel, his expression of protest against the Soviet Communist ruination of the Russia from which he fled. And perhaps that is what Nabokov had in mind. The portrayal of the Toad's inept yet overwhelming misrule, however, isn't nearly as specific to Stalinist Russia as the details of the imaginary setting suggest. The actual conduct of the Toad's toadies reminds me more of Nero, Idi Amin, or Pinochet. or any mad demagogue that has the whole life of his people in his fists for whatever reason. There's an unsatisfactory tinge of superman-worship in Nabokov's political philosophy, reminiscent of Nietzsche, Ibsen, Ouspensky, GB Shaw, Ayn Rand - that is, the fear of the exceptional man being crushed by the mass man. Paduk's organ is his Party of the Average man, and Krug refuses to be average. Communist Russia's catastrophe, I submit, was not the crushing of the exceptional man by the average, but just the opposite, the crushing and cruel exploitation of the ordinary people by an elite of extraordinary b_st_rds, proclaiming hypocritical ideals. The 'Vanguard of the Proletariat" is surely the most elitist notion ever propounded.

Here's an interesting passage from Krug's self-imaginings:
"The trouble with Krug, thought Krug, was tha for long summer years and with enormous success he had delicately taken apart the systems of others and had acquired thereby a reputation for an impish sense of humour and delightful common sense whereas in fact he was a big sad hog of a man and the 'common sense' affair had turned out to be the gradual digging of a pit to accomodate pure smiling madness.... so that he finally began regarding himself (robust rude Krug) as an illusion or rather as a shareholder in an illusion which was highly appreciated by a great number of cultured people..."
Self and the illusion of self, the doubling of consciousness, the watcher watching himself being watched -- such recurrent themes in Nabokov's books. With the boundaries between Krug and his Imaginer so deftly smudged, shouldn't we be tempted to take this passage as a confession?

It's the language, the symphonic glory of imagery and allusion, that in the end makes everything Nabokov wrote so absorbing, despite any bizarre characterization and/or appalling subject matter. I've often puzzled over Nabokov's notorious inability to appreciate music, to hear music as anything more than annoying noise.I think it was because he was unable to stop the flow of words in his mind, to hear without thinking and feeling in words. Perhaps that was what made him the writer he was, that every perceptual cranny of his mind was stuffed with words. And perhaps the ability to hear without words or see without words makes some people musicians or painters.

Bend Sinister is a very great novel, not just because it opens the gate to Nabokov's literary estate, but in its own right. It's easier to love than Lolita, and easier to grasp than Pale Fire. If you haven't yet become an admirer, this might be the best possible book to read first. If you love later Nabokov, you'll be astonished at how fully developed his art was already in his first American novel. ... Read more

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In an original and provocative reading of Vladimir Nabokov's work and the moral peril to which its readers are subjected, Eric Naiman explores the significance and consequences of Nabokov's insistence on bringing the issue of art's essential perversity to the fore. Nabokov's fiction is notorious for the interpretive panic it occasions in its readers, the sense that no matter how hard he or she tries, the reader has not gotten Nabokov 'right.' At the same time, the fictions abound with characters who might be labeled perverts, and questions of sexuality lurk everywhere. Naiman argues that the sexual and the interpretive are so bound together in Nabokov's stories and novels that the reader confronts the fear that there is no stable line between good reading and overreading, and that reading Nabokov well is beset by the exhilaration and performance anxiety more frequently associated with questions of sexuality than of literature. Nabokov's fictions pervert their readers, obligingly training them to twist and turn the text in order to puzzle out its meanings, so that they become not better people but closer readers, assuming all the impudence and potential for shame that sexually oriented close-looking entails.

In Nabokov, Perversely, Naiman traces the connections between sex and interpretation in Lolita (which he reads as a perverse work of Shakespeare scholarship), Pnin, Bend Sinister, and Ada. He examines the roots of perverse reading in The Defense and charts the enhanced attention to the connection between sex and metafiction in works translated from the Russian. He also takes on books by other authors--such as Reading Lolita in Tehran--that inappropriately incorporate Nabokov's writing within frameworks of moral usefulness. In a final, extraordinary chapter, Naiman reads Dostoevsky's The Double with Nabokov-trained eyes, making clear the power a strong writer can exert on readers. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (6)

Transcends literary criticism
I am not particularly interested in either Russia, literature or Nabakov, however the intersection of all of these, along with autobiographical material from Khrushcheva, make for an engaging and poignant book. I felt like I learned a great deal about Russia, the United States and the 20th century. I read this in two sittings.

Khrushcheva and Nabokov Go to High School
I stood in the school hallway, waiting for my son in the gym at the baseball clinic.It lasted two hours, too long for small talk with the other dads, so I was reading the final chapters of Nina Khrushcheva's "Imagining Nabokov".For me, it was a chance to learn more about a writer and another literature, about writing in a second language and culture, even as I stood surrounded by this very familiar sports culture.

When other dads passed by I covered the book a bit so I didn't seem so out of touch with the going concern of the day - baseball.If his dad seemed aloof or bookish, would his son be cut from the team?Would he be shunned by the other kids?Would I seem to be acting superior, even in a high school where you might expect reading to be encouraged, yet where I felt almost entirely out of place, as if living a segment of "The Diary of a Madman".

One dad passed by and saw the Khrushchev name on the dust cover.He started talking about the cold war and grimly praised the author's forebear as someone overly vilified by the U.S.I nodded to agree.That was a close call, but it made me feel more comfortable, so I read on.

In two hours, the clinic ended and I had finished the last chapters.I wanted to tell the dads in the hallway to read this book and to tell their sons about it.The author draws you easily into another world of ideas, one not even necessarily opposed to baseball!The world of great literature can exist with the world of sports and the ordinary - "mens sana in corpore sano".This book expands the imagination and neatly passes from culture to politics and back again.It should be read in serious high schools as well as anywhere else.And my son made the team.

Shades of exile, reflections in time, echos in space
I am so grateful to Nikita's great-granddaughter Nina for providing me with an excuse to talk about my favorite writer. Of course I had read everything available from Nabokov's Russian period in German or English translations, and from the American period more than once in the original. He was one of the greatest prose writers (let us ignore his poetry and his stage writing) of the 20th century, and he was the only writer that I know who achieved the top plateau in two languages. (The only comparison that occurs to me, J. Conrad, was a transcultural writer, but did he do anything substantial in Polish before he became an English writer? And as an English writer he never quite lost the touch of looking like a translation.)
VN was poetic, funny, provocative, playful, political, a-political, esoteric, scientific, opinionated, vain, in summary great. He is the only writer who motivated me to make a pilgrimage: I travelled to St.Petersburg mainly in order to visit the Nabokov Museum there, in the appartment where he had grown up during pre-revolution times.
Nina feels close to him: though she was a voluntary expatriate compared to his double-refugeedom (first from the Bolshies, then from the Nazis), both had made this transition from Russian ruling class to American middle class.
She sees more in him than an outstanding Russian exile author with a second language. He is a role model for a modernised Russia. And this is where I want to step out quietly, I can't comment on that subject, but I find her observations fascinating.
And I keep learning Russian on my bucket list.

Statues and Souls
Imagining Nabokov is one of those history's witty jokes: the cold war is over, and the author proves her great-granddad kitchen debates wrong--she falls in love with the most anti-communist dissident writer of the 20th century, Vladimir Nabokov. Actually, it is his posthumous statue that stands in Montreux, Switzerland, she is in love with. The statue story is just a hook, though. This is a charming, and rather unusual book that however succeeds in explaining the Russians' obsession with their literature and their soul. Indeed the Economist review published in February praised the book for that very reason.

Timely and original
An excellent book, and just in time when the Putin question is big in the news. It interconnects literature and politics, providing compelling reasons at to why Russia is so brilliant at art, but is its own worst enemy when it comes to democracy. This fascinating book addresses a problem of Russia's "lopsided" development, i.e. why Russia is a problem for Russians in a way that America isn't for Americans. Russia's problem is that "hypothetical and literary projects have a far greater hold on Russian people than practical ones." The idealistic and unrealistic character of Russian thinking makes Russiansincapable of pursuing realistic goals. The American Utopia is realistic, in Russia it is dream-like.Russians have an ingrained sense of the country's uniqueness and special messianic status. First, it was the holy Russian soul, then Russia as the Third Rome, then Russian imperialism, then communism which united the imperial and spiritual missions. Now Putin tells Russians that natural resources offer them thekey to regaining theirformer might. In Russian culture, communal values anda `great state' agenda take priority over individual and practicalprinciples.As Dostoievsky put it : "We may be backward, but we have souls."
Nina Khrushcheva convincingly argues that Nabokov is a better guide to the future than Dostoyevsky, because his characters `take responsibility for their lives.' In America, Nabokov taught Khrushchevahow to be a single `I' rather than a member of the many `we' in that "vast undifferentiated traditionalRussian collective of the peasant commune, the proletarian mass, the Soviet people, the post-communist Rossiyane." ... Read more

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Not only do the two writers discussed in this book both display exceptional artistic ability to express their thoughts in a foreign language (neither English in Vladimir Nabokov’s case, nor French in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s, is the author’s native tongue) but these two writers share many other concerns. Both deal with the theme of alienation in its various manifestations: immigration; the moral solitude of common or upright individuals; madness and other irrational behaviors; and women’s condition in society. The quest for happiness is at the core of Nabokov’s and Ben Jelloun’s respective works, but the solutions proposed by these two novelists highlight important differences regarding their views of life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

In Top 5 of 20th Century Novels, and well deserved!
This is an absolutely amazing piece of work.In 1962, when I first read it as a snot-nosed college student, I thought the translator had done a terrific job translating from Russian into English.It wasn't until 30 years later that I learned Vladimir Nabokov had written it in English, his second language.

He plays a massive practical joke on the reader.While he shocks us with the utter depravity of Humbert's lusts, he seduces us, as surely as Lolita does poor Humbert, into a state of near sympathy - certainly empathy - with Humbert's obsessions and consummations.Go ahead, read this and see if you, too, don't find yourself understanding Humbert, reveling in his passionate despair and guilty carnality.

If you haven't read this book, you're depriving yourself of an experience you'll never forget. ... Read more

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Classic novel of one's obsession with a younger girl ... Read more

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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; and, 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. ... Read more