Nabokov described this novella, written in Paris in 1939 but only published twenty years later, as ‘the first little throb of Lolita'. The plot is similar: a middle-aged man wedding an unattractive widow in order to indulge his...

When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel, “The Original of Laura.” But Nabokov's wife, Vera,...

A chilling story of obsession and madness. Luzhin, a distracted, withdrawn boy, takes up chess as a refuge from everyday life. As he rises to the heights of grandmaster, the game of chess gradually supplants the world of reality as he...

Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. But more: it is also at once a...

The state has been recently taken over and is being run by the tyrannical and philistine ‘Average Man’ party. Under the slogans of equality and happiness for all, it has done away with individualism and freedom of thought. Only John...

Nabokov's masterly Collected Poems span the decades of his career, from ‘Music', written in 1914, to the short, playful ‘To Vera', composed in 1974. ‘The University Poem', one of Nabokov's major poetic works, is here in...