Letters to Véra (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Nabokov, Vladimir

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141192240 ISBN 13: 9780141192246

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2016

Synopsis

GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014

No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer lasted longer than Vladimir Nabokov's. Véra 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 Véra 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.

About this title

Review:

"It is the prose itself that provides the lasting affirmation. The unresting responsiveness; the exquisite evocations of animals and of children; the way that everyone he comes across is minutely -individualized; the detailed visualizations of soirees and street scenes; the raw-nerved susceptibility to weather and underlying it all the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his divine energy." --Martin Amis, The New York Times Book Review (front page)

"A self-portrait of the young Vladimir unvarnished by Nabokovian irony. The earliest letters, intoxicated with language and desire, are intoxicating to read . . . A lifetime of scholarship informs this massive tome." --Judith Thurman, The New Yorker

"Letters to Véra, a five-decade epistolary love story, is like being handed a celebrity's unlocked iPhone. Pry away . . . I still hope for Nabokovian romance." --Keziah Weir, Elle

"A fascinating collection of correspondence . . . A wife--and indeed, a son--who could inspire such caring and creative letters as these deserve to be included in Nabokov's literary legacy." --Peter Tonguette, The Christian Science Monitor

"Letters to Véra opens the workshop door and shows us Vladimir not in his accredited hard-shell case of genius but as a soft, vulnerable practicing writer . . . Again and again, we see what Charles Kinbote, in Pale Fire, calls the magic of a mind 'perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements.'" --David Lipsky, Harper's Magazine

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.

Brian Boyd, University Distinguished Professor of English, University of Auckland, has long been associated with the work of Vladimir Nabokov, as annotator, bibliographer, biographer, critic, editor, translator and more. His works have appeared in nineteen languages and won awards on four continents.

Brian Boyd, University Distinguished Professor of English, University of Auckland, has long been associated with the work of Vladimir Nabokov, as annotator, bibliographer, biographer, critic, editor, translator and more. His works have appeared in nineteen languages and won awards on four continents.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0141192240
• ISBN 13: 9780141192246
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 864
• Editor: Voronina Olga, Boyd Brian