検索キーワード： 著者 "Vladimir Nabokov" すべてのカテゴリー

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. 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.

" Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of the hero - sullen, gawky Hugh Person - to Switzerland.... As a young publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride.... Eight years later - following a murder, a period of madness and a brief imprisonment - Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle out his past...." (Martin Amis)

Als der vierzigjährige Arthur im Park ein Mädchen beim Rollschuhfahren beobachtet, fühlt er sich sofort zu ihm hingezogen. Um dem Kind näherzukommen, heiratet er kurz darauf dessen schwerkranke Mutter. Doch diese scheint seine wahren Beweggründe zu erahnen und gibt die Tochter in eine Pflegefamilie. Erst nach ihrem Tod kann Arthur die Stieftochter zu sich holen. Die Erfüllung seiner Wünsche scheint zum Greifen nah - bis er selbst zum Opfer seines verbotenen Verlangens wird.

As intricate as a house of mirrors, Nabokov’s last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899), whose life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, though the two are not to be confused (?).

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.

Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.

Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition.

Professor Timofey Pnin ist ein Ritter der traurigen Gestalt. Der Exilrusse lehrt Literatur an einem amerikanischen Provinzcollege und versucht, sich in der neuen Heimat zurechtzufinden. Weder versteht er die Feinheiten der englischen Sprache, noch ist er in der Lage, die gesellschaftlichen Codes des American Way of Life zu entschlüsseln. Überängstlich und zwanghaft, in seiner Tapsigkeit dabei anrührend, taumelt Pnin von einem Missgeschick zum nächsten. Doch trotz aller Demütigungen, die er sich nicht zuletzt selbst beifügt, schafft er es, seine Würde durch alle Widernisse zu retten.

Auf einer Geschäftsreise nach Prag glaubt der windige Schokoladenfabrikant Hermann Karlowitsch im Landstreicher Felix seinen Doppelgänger zu erkennen, und ein genialer Plan reift in ihm heran: Er wird den jungen Mann töten und so den eigenen Tod vortäuschen, um das Geld aus der Lebensversicherung einzustreichen. In seiner grenzenlosen Selbstüberschätzung prahlt der Erzähler, Möchtegern-Autor und Meisterverbrecher jedoch mit seiner Genialität und gerät dadurch bald in arge Bedrängnis.

"Lolita, Licht meines Lebens, Feuer meiner Lenden. Meine Sünde, meine Seele. Lo-li-ta: die Zungenspitze macht drei Sprünge den Gaumen hinab und tippt bei Drei gegen die Zähne. Lo. Li. Ta." Der viel umstrittene, längst zu Weltruhm gelangte und zweifach verfilmte Roman einer tragischen Passion: Ein Vierzigjähriger verfällt dem grazilen Zauber einer kindlichen Nymphe und erfährt die Liebe als absolute Macht über Leben und Tod.

"La Vénitienne", "Bonté", "Le rasoir", "Le Voyageur" et "Musique". Cinq nouvelles écrites dans les années 1920 et qui, par leur force et leur beauté, confirment si besoin était que Vladimir Nabokov n'était pas seulement un grand maître du roman mais aussi un formidable nouvelliste. Dans ces nouvelles où l'on croise des artistes et des expatriés, il flotte un air de nostalgie et de haute poésie comme ce portrait de femme qui capte sur la surface de la toile le rêve d'un jeune homme trop amoureux.

These masterly poems span the whole of Nabokov's career from "Music", written in 1914, to the short, playful "To Vera", composed in 1974. The works are newly translated by Dmitiri Nabokov, and include "The University Poem", an extraordinary autobiographical poem in which Nabokov recalls his life in Cambridge, with its crooked alleys and age-old gates, teas at the vicar's and British girls. Included to are such poems as "To Russia" ("Will you leave me alone! I implore you!), the enchanting "Eve", and verse about America, sport, love, and poetry itself.

Nabokov’s third novel, The Luzhin Defense, is a chilling story of obsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen — an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster — but at a cost: in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality.

The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom.

In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of serio-comic Russian émigrés, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair. His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia. In stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin’s, who, he discovers, is Mary’s husband....

"...bir öyküyü Rusça okurken duyduğum heyecanı, sürükleyiciliği, Rus insanının Anadolu insanına tıpatıp benzeyen 'kara mizah' yönünü Türkçe çeviriye olduğu gibi taşımaya çalıştım. Bu çevirilerin hiç birine fazla renk katılmamış, içinden renk alınmamıştır. İyi dinlemeler..."

Nos hallamos ante una obra maestra, un tour de force; una novela originalísima, desconcertante y diabólicamente divertida, que figura entre las preferidas de su propio autor y en la que refulge, de forma inigualable, su alambicada ironía y su mortífero humor. 'Pálido fuego' se presenta como...

Pnin está considerada como "la más deliciosa de las novelas de Nabokov" (G. M. Hyde), "la más inmediatamente atractiva" (Laurie Clancy) y, posiblemente, la más divertida de toda su obra, tan rebosante de humor. Su protagonista es el profesor Pnin, un ruso de la emigración que se gana la vida dando clases a media docena escasa de alumnos desganados que acuden a su aula como quien va a ver una película de Buster Keaton.