Letters to V�ra - Softcover

Nabokov, Vladimir

3.97

1,009 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141192232 ISBN 13: 9780141192239

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2014

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GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014

No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer lasted longer than Vladimir Nabokov's. V�ra Slonim shared his delight at the enchantment of life's trifles and literature's treasures, and he rated her as having the best and quickest sense of humour of any woman he had met. From their meeting in 1921, Vladimir's letters to his beloved V�ra form a narrative arc that tells a forty-six year-long love story, and they are memorable in their entirety. Almost always playful, romantic, and pithy, the letters tell us much about the man and the writer; we see that Vladimir observed everything, from animals, faces, speech, and landscapes with genuine fascination.

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Review:

[These] letters contain some of the most moving passages he would ever write, full of alternately impressionistic and exquisitely detailed glimpses at the world around him, which he portrays as almost painfully beautiful . . . The Nabokov on display in this beautifully produced volume . . . [is] an author who sees his task as talking his fragile reader down from an upper-storey ledge by showing her the luminosity of a world that has somehow ceased to be a source of delight . . . [This] publication is an impressive achievement . . . The richly textured, eminently readable translations by Boyd and Olga Voronina are admirably faithful (Times Literary Supplement)

Some of the most rapturous love letters anyone has ever written, love letters from the length of a lifelong marriage; beautiful performances for V�ra, Nabokov's wife, and incidentally for us . . . so absorbing . . . sentences of pure magic (Philip Hensher Spectator)

A compelling record, it confirms Nabokov as possibly the most happily married writer of the 20th century. Every one of his books was dedicated to V�ra; she was the sure centre of his world . . . Tinged with a sensuous immediacy of detail, Letters to V�ra is a record of rapture . . . Superbly edited by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd, these letters reveal Nabokov as a considerable wit, with a gift for terse put-downs and fascination with what remained outside his class and culture - whether it was Greyhound buses in Massachusetts or the New York subway. Now, perhaps for the first time, the Russian writer emerges distinct from the shadows of his biographers, and as one of the most uxoriously besotted writers of all time (Ian Thomson Observer)

Nabokov's letters to V�ra, translated from the Russian and published for the first time in a handsome and meticulously edited edition, provide insight into the unfolding of Nabokov's considerable talent. It has been a collaborative production, driven by the doyen of Nabokov scholarship, Brian Boyd, and assisted by Olga Voronina, of Bard College . . . this is Nabokov uncut (Duncan White Telegraph)

About the Author:

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.

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