In his autobiography Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov compared his life to a spiral, in which “twirl follows twirl, and every synthesis is the thesis of the next series.” The first four arcs of the spiral of Nabokov’s life—his youth in Russia, voluntary exile in Europe, two decades spent in the United States, and the final years of his life in Switzerland—are now followed by a fifth arc, his continuing life in literary history, which this volume both explores and symbolizes.

This is the first collection of essays to examine all five arcs of Nabokov’s creative life through close analyses of representative works. The essays cast new light on works both famous and neglected and place these works against the backgrounds of Nabokov’s career as a whole and modern literature in general. Nabokov analyzes his own artistry in his “Postscript to the Russian Edition of Lolita,” presented here in its first English translation, and in his little-known “Notes to Ada by Vivian Darkbloom,” published now for the first time in America and keyed to the standard U.S. editions of the novel. In addition to a defense of his father’s work by Dmitri Nabokov and a portrait-interview by Alfred Appel, Jr., the volume presents a vast spectrum of critical analyses covering all Nabokov’s major novels and several important short stories. The highly original structure of the book and the fresh and often startling revelations of the essays dramatize as never before the unity and richness of Nabokov’s unique literary achievement.

J. E. Rivers is Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Charles Nicol was Professor of English at Indiana State University.

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction (Charles Nicol and J. E. Rivers)
• 1. The Fifth Arc
  • Nabokov: A Portrait (Alfred Appel, Jr.)
  • Nabokov’s Critical Strategy (James M. Rambeau)
  • A Few Things That Must Be Said on Behalf of Vladimir Nabokov (Dmitri Nabokov)
  • Toward the Man behind the Mystification (Phyllis A. Roth)
• 2. The First and Second Arcs
  • Nabokov’s Assault on Wonderland (Beverly Lyon Clark)
  • The Conjuror in “The Potato Elf” (Walter Evans)
  • The Cartesian Nightmare of Despair (William C. Carroll)
  • Invitation to a Beheading and the Many Shades of Kafka (Margaret Byrd Boegeman)
• 3. The Third Arc
  • Focus Pocus: Film Imagery in Bend Sinister (Beverly Gray Bienstock)
  • Deciphering “Signs and Symbols” (Larry R. Andrews)
  • Humbert Humbert and the Limits of Artistic License (Gladys M. Clifton)
  • Parody and Authenticity in Lolita (Thomas R. Frosch)
  • Postscript to the Russian Edition of Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov (Translated by Earl D. Sampson))
  • Pnin: The Wonder of Recurrence and Transformation (Julian W. Connolly)
• 4. The Fourth Arc
  • Pale Fire: The Art of Consciousness (Marilyn Edelstein)
  • Speak, Memory: The Aristocracy of Art (Carol Shloss)
  • Ada or Disorder (Charles Nicol)
  • Notes to Ada by Vivian Darkbloom (Vladimir Nabokov, edited by J. E. Rivers and William Walker)
  • Notes to Vivian Darkbloom’s Notes to Ada (J. E. Rivers and William Walker)
  • The Problem of Text: Nabokov’s Last Two Novels (Paul S. Bruss)
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography