Despair.
by Nabokov, Vladimir
- Used
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- Ex-library, lacks rear free endpaper, back hinge cracked, lower spine & cover edges worn, footer of book and dj chewed at ve
- Seller
-
Brattleboro, Vermont, 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
- Seller
- The Bear Bookshop, John Greenberg (US)
- Seller's Inventory #
- 10056051302
- Title
- Despair.
- Author
- Nabokov, Vladimir
- Format/Binding
- Black cloth.
- Book Condition
- Used - Ex-library, lacks rear free endpaper, back hinge cracked, lower spine & cover edges worn, footer of book and dj chewed at ve
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Publisher
- Putnam's.
- Place of Publication
- NY.
- Date Published
- (c1966).
- Pages
- 222pp.
- Size
- 8vo
- Keywords
- Literature, Vladimir Nabokov, 20th Century Russian Literature, Fiction, 1st Editions, Novels
Terms of Sale
The Bear Bookshop, John Greenberg
About the Seller
The Bear Bookshop, John Greenberg
About The Bear Bookshop, John Greenberg
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Good+
- A term used to denote a condition a slight grade better than Good.
- Cracked
- In reference to a hinge or a book's binding, means that the glue which holds the opposing leaves has allowed them to separate,...
- Cloth
- "Cloth-bound" generally refers to a hardcover book with cloth covering the outside of the book covers. The cloth is stretched...
- Spine
- The outer portion of a book which covers the actual binding. The spine usually faces outward when a book is placed on a shelf....
- Hinge
- The portion of the book closest to the spine that allows the book to be opened and closed.
- Edges
- The collective of the top, fore and bottom edges of the text block of the book, being that part of the edges of the pages of a...
- 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...