Description
In this book, Brian Boyd surveys Vladimir Nabokov's life, career, and legacy; his art, science, and thought; his subtle humor and puzzle-like storytelling; his complex psychological portraits; and his inheritance from, reworking of, and affinities with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Machado de Assis. Boyd also offers new ways of reading Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada or Ardor, and the unparalleled autobiography, Speak, Memory, disclosing otherwise unknown information about the author's world. Sharing his personal reflections as he recounts the adventures, hardships, and revelations of researching Nabokov's life? oeuvre?, he cautions against using Nabokov's metaphysics as the key to unlocking all of the enigmatic author's secrets. Assessing and appreciating Nabokov as novelist, memoirist, poet, translator, scientist, and individual, Boyd helps us understand more than ever Nabokov's multifaceted genius.
About the Author
Brian Boyd (b.1952) is known primarily as an expert on the life and works of authorVladimir Nabokovand on literature and evolution. He is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.In 1979, after Boyd completed a PhD at the University of Toronto with a dissertation on Nabokov's novelAda or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, he took up a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Auckland (appointed as lecturer in English in 1980). Also in 1979, Nabokov’s widow, Véra, invited Boyd to catalog her husband's archives, a task which he completed in 1981.WhileNabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness(1985; rev. 2001), was considered as "an instant classic,"Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years(1990) andVladimir Nabokov: The American Years(1991) have won numerous awards and been translated into seven languages. In 2009 he publishedOn the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction, often compared in scope withNorthrop Frye'sAnatomy of Criticism(1957).
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