Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins.
The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri.
Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions–which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.
Book Description
The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and popular success of Lolita had made him an international literary figure.
An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, this darkly witty novel of suspense, literary one-upmanship, and political intrigue achieves that rarest of things in literature–perfect tragicomic balance.
With an Introduction by Richard Rorty
發表於2025-03-16
Pale Fire 2025 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載
在看完納博科夫的《微暗的火》之後,我捶胸頓足:不是後悔自己沒有早早下手寫齣一本《微暗的火》來,而是對我國古代的大詩人屈原感到氣憤和委屈,如果他不是寫完《離騷》之後就迅速投江,而是慢慢在那首詩之後細細做些注解,然後裏麵再加些宮庭逸事,逃亡經曆什麼的,那麼,我...
評分納博科夫寫這本書到底要告訴我們什麼?是內容本身的意義還是形式帶給來的新的嘗試和美感?《我的名字叫紅》裏麵也有個凶手,橄欖,蝴蝶,鸛鳥,是誰並不重要,隻要知道謀殺是文化衝突造成的內涵就夠瞭。同樣,變態的(金伯特眼中的)格拉杜斯追殺逃亡的贊巴拉國王的故事並沒什...
評分 評分在看完納博科夫的《微暗的火》之後,我捶胸頓足:不是後悔自己沒有早早下手寫齣一本《微暗的火》來,而是對我國古代的大詩人屈原感到氣憤和委屈,如果他不是寫完《離騷》之後就迅速投江,而是慢慢在那首詩之後細細做些注解,然後裏麵再加些宮庭逸事,逃亡經曆什麼的,那麼,我...
評分圖書標籤: 文學 VladimirNabokov Nabokov 小說 美國 納博科夫 友人推薦 Plae
最偉大的小說!!!A Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem!
評分希望能在閱覽室囫圇看一遍 nabokov的小說生詞太多瞭
評分Very hard-to-read post-modernist novel. Incredibly inspiring
評分"Why do you have two copies of this book?" "Which one? Oh Pale Fire... Pale Fire is not a book."
評分這個敘述者真是學渣我看過中最討厭的瞭。commentary部分一開始會給我有點分裂的感覺,再想想就覺得按Kinbote的人設來說,這麼分裂就對瞭。其實說到底,不是很喜歡,但是就是覺得蠻不錯的欸。
Pale Fire 2025 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載