Dmitri Nabokov’s translation is included in Nabokov’s Collected Poems, to be published by Penguin in July.
1 ‘So then you’re Russian? It’s the first time I have met a Russian …’ And the lively, delicately bulging eyes examine me. ‘You take your tea with lemon, I already know. I also know that you have icons where you live, and samovars.’ A pretty girl. A British glow spreads across her tender skin. She laughs, she speaks at a quick clip: ‘Frankly,...
That Plato was by nature a short-story writer, not a novelist, seems clear. Walt Whitman was a novelist, Chopin a writer of short stories. Michelangelo was a novelist, Picasso a writer of short...
Nabokov liked to write standing up (‘Piles,’ he told a fellow-teacher at Cornell, who thought it might be some short cut to creativity), and his letters reflect that inflexible...
This “long lost novel” isn’t a novel but a story of some twenty-five thousand words, here augmented by eight thousand from the pen of the translator, and by blank pages. The...
Since his death in 1977, Nabokov has made three literary appearances: rather plodding affairs for such a gifted ghost, even allowing for their modest academic occasions and for the fact that the...
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