Stalking Nabokov
Author(s): Brian Boyd
At the age of twenty-one, Brian Boyd wrote an essay on Vladimir Nabokov that the author called "brilliant." In 1991, after gaining exclusive access to the writer's archives, he wrote a two-part, award-winning biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, that has become standard reading. This collection features essays written by Boyd after completing Nabokov's biography, incorporating material he gleaned from his research as well as new discoveries and formulations. This volume forms the perfect companion for readers of Nabokov, approaching the author from a variety of angles and perspectives. Boyd confronts Nabokov's life, career, and legacy; his art, science, and thought; his subtle humor and puzzle-like storytelling; his complex psychological portraits; and his inheritance from, reworking of, or affinities with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Machado de Assis. Boyd offers new ways of reading Nabokov's best English-language work: Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and the unparalleled autobiography, Speak, Memory, and he discloses otherwise unknown information about the author's world. Sharing his personal reflections, Boyd recounts the adventures, hardships, and revelations of researching Nabokov's biography and his unusual finds in the archives, including materials still awaiting publication. The first to focus on Nabokov's metaphysics, Boyd in fact downplays their importance, instead emphasizing the author's humor, reinvention of narrative possibility, and psychological renderings of various characters to unlock the greater mysteries. Reading Nabokov as novelist, memoirist, poet, translator, scientist, and individual, Boyd further immortalizes his far-reaching, versatile talents.
Product Information
"In this collection of essays, lectures, and book reviews spanning 20 years since the publication of Boyd's two-volume biography of Nabokov, Boyd demonstrates that he continues to be our leading interpreter of this brilliant but enigmatic writer. With remarkable critical insight, Boyd reflects on a wide variety of subjects ranging from the art and craft of the biographer and Nabokov's famous love of butterflies to the novelist's humor, metaphysics, and the influence on him of other writers — from Shakespeare to Tolstoy. For example, Nabokov's 'humor springs from 'the comedy of life's mismatching our expectations.... Nabokov loves and laughs at life even amid loss.' In a centennial toast, Boyd captures lovingly Nabokov's enduring appeal and the essence of his genius: 'He believes that the fullness and the complexity of life suggest worlds within worlds within worlds, and he builds his own imagined universes to match... he allows us to find our own way to them, just as he thinks whatever lies behind life invites us to an endless adventure of discovery in and beyond life.' Boyd's graceful style and passionate advocacy achieves the goal of the best literary criticism: it compels us to pick up Nabokov and read, or read again, the work of a master. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC.
Brian Boyd is University Distinguished Professor of English, University of Auckland. His work on American, Brazilian, English, Greek, Irish, New Zealand, and Russian literature, from epics to comics, has appeared in sixteen languages and has won awards on four continents. Known also for his evolutionary and cognitive work, he is the author of On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction and coeditor of Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader.
General Fields
- :
- : Columbia University Press
- : Columbia University Press
- : 01 October 2011
- : 235x160mm
- : United States
- : 01 November 2011
- : books
Special Fields
- : Brian Boyd
- : hardback with dustjacket
- : 813.54
- : very good
- : xviii, 452
