The Eye
by Nabokov, Vladimir
- Used
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- Fine in Very Good dust jacket
- Seller
-
Silver Spring, Maryland, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Synopsis
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins. The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri. Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions--which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.
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Details
- Bookseller
- Dale A. Sorenson (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 8598
- Title
- The Eye
- Author
- Nabokov, Vladimir
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Fine in Very Good dust jacket
- Edition
- First Edition; 1st State
- Publisher
- Phaedra
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 1965
- Weight
- 0.00 lbs
- Keywords
- Fiction, Russian Literature, American Literature
Terms of Sale
Dale A. Sorenson
About the Seller
Dale A. Sorenson
About Dale A. Sorenson
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Fine
- A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...
- First State
- used in book collecting to refer to a book from the earliest run of a first edition, generally distinguished by a change in some...
- Soiled
- Generally refers to minor discoloration or staining.
- Copyright page
- The page in a book that describes the lineage of that book, typically including the book's author, publisher, date of...
- Price Clipped
- When a book is described as price-clipped, it indicates that the portion of the dust jacket flap that has the publisher's...
- First Edition
- In book collecting, the first edition is the earliest published form of a book. A book may have more than one first edition in...
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
- Cloth
- "Cloth-bound" generally refers to a hardcover book with cloth covering the outside of the book covers. The cloth is stretched...