Imagining Nabokov Russia Between Art and Politics |
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Author:
| Khrushcheva, Nina L. |
ISBN: | 978-0-300-10886-6 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2008 |
Publisher: | Yale University Press
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Book Format: | Hardback |
List Price: | USD $65.00 |
Book Description:
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Vladimir Nabokov’s "Western choice”--his exile to the West after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution--allowed him to take a crucial literary journey, leaving the closed nineteenth-century Russian culture behind and arriving in the extreme openness of twentieth-century America. In Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics, Nina L. Khrushcheva offers the novel hypothesis that because of this journey, the works...
More Description
Vladimir Nabokov’s "Western choice”--his exile to the West after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution--allowed him to take a crucial literary journey, leaving the closed nineteenth-century Russian culture behind and arriving in the extreme openness of twentieth-century America. In Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics, Nina L. Khrushcheva offers the novel hypothesis that because of this journey, the works of Russian-turned-American Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) are highly relevant to the political transformation under way in Russia today. Khrushcheva, a Russian living in America, finds in Nabokov’s novels a useful guide for Russia’s integration into the globalized world. Now one of Nabokov’s "Western” characters herself, she discusses the cultural and social realities of contemporary Russia that he foresaw a half-century earlier.
In Pale Fire; Ada, or Ard∨ Pnin; and other works, Nabokov reinterpreted the traditions of Russian fiction, shifting emphasis from personal misery and communal life to the notion of forging one’s own "happy” destiny. In the twenty-first century Russia faces a similar challenge, Khrushcheva contends, and Nabokov’s work reveals how skills may be acquired to cope with the advent of democracy, capitalism, and open borders.