In the following essay, Grayson discusses the importance of Nabokov's work as a translator to the development of his work as a novelist.

In the following essay, Sweeney discusses the role of fairy tale elements in Nabokov's “A Nursery Tale.”

In the following essay, Toker compares the plot, characters, and situations in the Russian and English versions of King, Queen, Knave.

In the following essay, Foster defines the importance of “anticipatory memory” in Nabokov's early Russian novels, the ones written before he became familiar with the Proustian practice of involuntary memory.

In the following essay, Pifer argues that characters who appear to be doubles of each other in Nabokov's fictions actually are not.

In the following essay, Lyons surveys Nabokov's American novels.

In the following essay, Connolly examines Nabokov's variations of Dostoevskian themes in his fiction.

In the following essay, Amis argues that the three “black farces,” King, Queen, Knave; Laughter in the Dark; and Despair are precursors to Lolita.

In the following essay, Shute analyzes Nabokov's aversion to Freud.

In the following essay, Morris explores Nabokov's technique of using the play of consciousness as the narrative voice.

In the following essay, Paperno and Hagopian detail the treatment of Nabokov's work in the Soviet Union.

In the following essay, Bruss examines the relation of the narrators to the texts they create in Nabokov's last novels.

In the following criticism of philosopher Richard Rorty's reading of Nabokov, Stow argues Rorty is, himself, a Nabokovian type.

In the following essay, Karlinsky examines the sources of two of Nabokov's plays and their similarities to his novels.

In the following essay, Foster discusses Nabokov's place on the modernist/postmodernist continuum.

Two basic questions … confront us in Lolita. First, is Humbert Humbert "really" a lover and an artist or a pervert and a fool, or is he some curious combination of opposites? Second, what is the thematic focus of the novel as a whole? Critics who attempt to answer such questions, of course, risk provoking Nabokov's wrath. In his afterword to the novel, Nabokov sarcastically dismisses "Teachers of Literature [who] are apt to think up such problems as 'What is the aut...

In the following essay, Ermarth examines the tension between reflexive and representational language in Nabokov's fiction and in the theories of Julia Kristeva, the French philosopher of language.

In the following essay, Alter examines the intersection of past and present, of actual memory and reconstructed scenes in Nabokov's autobiography, Speak, Memory.

In the following essay, Pifer argues that frequent critical charges that Nabokov's novels represent the work of an aesthetic disposition devoid of human concern misrepresent the writer and his work.

If one can generalize as far as to say that fiction falls into the two broad categories of realism and romance, Nabokov's work belongs in the latter category. The reader of today is likely to find the romance of Nabokov's art strangely archaic and old-fashioned. In some ways he seems to have stronger affinities with the nineteenth century than with the twentieth. This affinity is not simply an accident of age and environment … but a matter of temperament and conscious choice. (p. 5) [Na...

In the following essay, Buhks discusses Nabokov's ambivalent critique of Dostoevski.

Sometimes Nabokov in his authorial person mocks the passive or careless reader with his inattention; more often he silently challenges the alert reader by hiding significant clues in insignificant places, covering a real gesture with flashy indirections, hinting through what seem to be accidental correspondences at what seem to be significant significances. The novels click and glitter like sewing machines; they are so active and provoking on their corrugated and baroque surfaces, that one is apt to overloo...

In the following essay, Jones examines the parallels between Lolita in Nabokov's novel and Albertine in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

The difficulty of assessing Nabokov's achievement as a novelist writing about people obviously derives from the flagrantly artificial quality of his fiction…. The Nabokovian universe, we all know, is a construct of words, taking life from the page and pen of its author. Self-conscious artifice intrudes on the reader's awareness, signaling the discontinuities between Nabokov's fabricated worlds and the one we call our own…. The continuous word-play, allusions, self-consciou...

The following is a British Broadcasting Company transcript of Nabokov's last interview in 1977.

[There are two virtual commonplaces] about the art of Vladimir Nabokov: that it is anti-realistic or anti-mimetic, and therefore a deliberate reproach to the Great Tradition of the nineteenth-century novel; that its major subject is art itself, which makes it a supreme example of what we now call metafiction. (p. 439) Surely his own books reject the conventions of realism for a deliberate and even exaggerated artifice, an art about different conceptions of art. Such, at least, is the conventional wisdom app...

In the following essay, originally published in 1986, Kiš pays tribute to Nabokov for writing novels dedicated to literary play rather than social commentary.

In the following essay, Seifrid argues that visual and thematic elements in Nabokov's fiction correspond to passages in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

Vladimir Nabokov, who appreciated artfully layered constructions and perceived all art as a fusion of layers in the time-and-space-defying eyes of the great writer and good reader, would have applauded the publishing of his college lectures in Lectures on Literature—indeed, he planned to publish them himself. Here, if ever, is a book to be experienced on several levels. To begin with, it is a reading of Mansfield Park, Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Swann's Way, Metamorphos...

Andrew Field does not exist. The book recently published under his name, Nabokov: His Life in Part, is in fact a novel written by Vladimir Nabokov. It is the final and most triumphantly ironic work of one of the most important authors of this century. Such, at any rate, is the impression created upon a reader of Nabokov's fiction by Mr. Field's new book. I do not actually know whether Andrew Field exists, and I would prefer not to find out. Unfortunately, so as to protect this publication and ...

Always rather a hazardous business bringing two prime donne together…. Actually Edmund Wilson and Nabokov come out of the test rather well [in The Nabokov-Wilson Letters], especially when one considers how grumpy one was and how intolerably conceited the other. Wilson comes out rather better, for he wears characteristic American generosity as a halo. What Nabokov would have done without him is hard to see: arriving unknown as an exile, Nabokov was hard put to it, until the financial success of Lolita...

Nabokov's writing is sophisticated in the way that good music is sophisticated: we have not only to remember the theme, but to be able to recognize it when it reappears in another key, rhythmically altered, inverted, or combined with other themes…. [Reading] Nabokov is an active process of making connections between different parts of the text: we become not mere readers, but finders of the narrative. (pp. 220-21) Transparent Things is not the most difficult of Nabokov's works, but its ...

In the following review of Stacy Schiff's biography of Vera Nabokov, Maddox outlines the relationship between the Nabokovs, and its significance for Nabokov's career as a writer.

Can anyone doubt that rather than duplicate the parturitional feat whereby a mountain spews forth a mouse, Nabokov opts for the reverse maternal drama in which a mouse risks conception to bring forth a mountain? Ostensibly in Ada, the authorial quest involves the pursuit of Time by Memory, the two being courtly lovers of the mind whose Proustian infidelities often leave us wondering whether in our romance with the past we haven't somehow confused the fictional swain with the autobiographical cuckold....

There are, as one would expect, many dazzling moments in [Lectures on Literature], but the most striking point about them is the industry that went into their making. It would be painful to think of this erudite, debonair man carefully transcribing the lyrics of "The Croppy Boy," an 18th-century Irish ballad, into his teaching copy of Ulysses merely to quote a few lines in class if his enjoyment of such tasks were not evident on every page. Nabokov addressed his students with utmost dignity, s...

Vladimir Nabokov's recent novels in English have not won him many converts nor have they discouraged the view that his art is mere artificial gamesmanship of a wholly self-congratulating type. Yet that view is at best deficient, as any reader of Lolita knows at once, and therefore it's good to have another example now to prove it. Details of a Sunset and Other Stories is Nabokov's last volume to be translated from the Russian, a process he began fourteen books ago with Invitation to a B...

Professor Vladimir Nabokov's beautiful memoir Speak Memory has now been succeeded by Strong Opinions—a collection of press clippings in which he has preserved for future classes what looks to be every interview granted during the last decade. (p. 61) Alas, the Black Swan of Swiss-American letters has a lot of explaining to do (no singing, however: we need the swan for many a future summer). In addition to the bubbling interviews, Professor Nabokov recounts the many misunderstandings between hi...

[A] work of art is inevitably a rendering of emotion, observation, and philosophical speculation in aesthetic terms, or at least in an aesthetic realm. In Nabokov's case it is not that the action or characters of a novel "stand for" or "represent" the writing of a novel or the figure of the artist, but that certain descriptions of experience, character, or emotion illuminate and approximate artistic creation. Though depicted through the medium of creative prose, and freque...

In Lectures on Literature Vladimir Nabokov … not only fingers every thread in some half-dozen novels, but also appraises the weave of the narrative and the pattern of the imagery, and with the eye of one who knows, points out the fine buttonholing in the first sentence and the satisfying zippering of the last. Given annually at Cornell University from 1948–1958, these lectures were designed to introduce undergraduates to "Masters of European Fiction."… [They] are now prese...

One of the most fascinating characteristics of The Gift, the last novel Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Russian, is the slippage which takes place in the narrative point of view. Though the novel begins in the third person, and continues essentially in this mode throughout, quite often the "I" of the protagonist Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev breaks in with no warning to the reader. If this were not confusing enough, an additional parade of narrative acrobatics dances across the first chapter. (p. 138) ...

As part of his demolition of the then fashionable politico-socio-Marxist readings of Flaubert's Madame Bovary …, Nabokov would tell his students, "let us remember that literature is of no practical value whatsoever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a professor of literature." No practical value whatsoever: ah yes, Nabokov's cherished fin-de-siécle esthetic of Art-for-Art's-Sake runs, like a string through ...

Faithful Nabokovians have met Mary before; she sat for her portrait as Tamara in Speak, Memory, lurks near the heart of Lolita, and was deified in Ada. [In Mary], artistically as well as chronologically young, she is the first love of the autobiographical hero, Ganin, for whom her wanton yet delicate Tartar beauty condenses into pure perfume the idyll of rural Russia and the enchantment of privileged youth. But Ganin remembers her from afar, when he is in a Berlin boarding house surrounded by other é...

As novelist, Nabokov fits his own description of the role as a combination of teacher, story-teller and enchanter, and [Lectures on Literature] proves that he was all of these as lecturer too. But the feeling persists that the altered sentences of Mansfield Park, the sketches of Gregor Samsa's flat, the notes on precisely what kind of insect he was … belong not in a book but in the archives. Nabokov's wit and insight are often dazzling but despite his exhaustive—and exhausting&#x...

The best of [Nabokov's] humor is not inflicted upon us. It appears thinly, a condensate, like something in our breath. It is humor that points at something unseen and unfunny. "Speaking of old men … an eccentric librarian called Porlock … in the last years of his dusty life had been engaged in examining old books for miraculous misprints such as the substitution of 'l' for the second 'h' in the word 'hither.'… all he sought was the...