The Russian-born American poet, fiction writer, critic, and butterfly expert Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), one of the most highly acclaimed novelists of his time, was noted for his sensuous and lyrical descriptions, verbal games and experimental narrativ...

It is a paradox that Vladimir Nabokov's life and career dramatically involved him in the most powerful socio-historical currents of the twentieth century: Marxist revolution, exile, politics, the sexual revolution, and the poshlost of the universities an...

Russian American author Vladimir Nabokov wrote novels, short stories, poems, translations, and literary criticism. His novels firmly established him as one of the best stylists of the twentieth century. In 1955 the overwhelming success of Nabokov's novel...

JORGEN NASH never expected to set a trend. In 1964, angry at the women in his life, he decapitated Denmark's most famous female - the little mermaid who sits peacefully waiting for her prince on Copenhagen's seafront. History does not record what his...

In the United States crime dominates news headlinges and holds big-city Americans emotionally hostage. It threatens to socially gerrymander the citizenry into the "secures" and the "not secures." In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, crime is not a problem. Saudi Arabia's system...

In the following essay, Lachmann analyzes the signification of “alphabet games” in Invitation to a Beheading.

[Invitation to a Beheading is,] like many great works of fiction, richly suggestive, and to attempt to discredit the meanings that others have found within its pages would be pointless. Most recent studies stress the dichotomy of two modes of humanity suggested in the contrast between an innocent, cognizant, opaque Cincinnatus and his bumptious, transparent keepers…. [Most] readings tend to render Cincinnatus as being, from the beginning, a kind of innocent, perceptive, visionary soul—a man wh...