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2025-03-12
Pale Fire 2025 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載
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...
評分我是那慘遭殺害的連雀的陰影 凶手是窗玻璃那片虛假的碧空; 《微暗的火》的長詩部分華麗地開始,第一行的最後兩個字——陰影(Shade),就是小說的其中一位主人公,謝德。連雀撞上窗玻璃,倒在地上。這是否暗示著謝德之後的命運,那倒也無所謂瞭。謝德(Shade)是太陽直射下來照齣...
評分 評分The respective impacts and penetrations of Marxism and Freudism being talked of; I said: "The worst of two false doctrines is always that which is harder to eraticate." Shade: "No, Charlie, there are simpler criteria: Marxism needs a dictator, and a dictato...
評分圖書標籤: 文學 VladimirNabokov Nabokov 小說 美國 納博科夫 友人推薦 Plae
斷斷續續的用瞭一年時間纔看完。。。#真的不能用一段什麼生命之光欲念之火就能錶示看過nabokov啊
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。
評分Very hard-to-read post-modernist novel. Incredibly inspiring
評分一本錶麵上講述暗殺實則關於藝術的書
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