Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov
    Unavailable
    The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov
    Unavailable
    The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov
    Ebook611 pages10 hours

    The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

    By Andrea Pitzer

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A startling and revelatory examination of Nabokov’s life and works—notably Pale Fire and Lolita—bringing new insight into one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic authors
    Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fleeing France with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis. He repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering to write artful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in the English language really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so many critics?
    Using information from newly-declassified intelligence files and recovered military history, journalist Andrea Pitzer argues that far from being a proponent of art for art’s sake, Vladimir Nabokov managed to hide disturbing history in his fiction—history that has gone unnoticed for decades. Nabokov emerges as a kind of documentary conjurer, spending the most productive decades of his career recording a saga of forgotten concentration camps and searing bigotry, from World War I to the Gulag and the Holocaust. Lolita surrenders Humbert Humbert’s secret identity, and reveals a Nabokov appalled by American anti-Semitism. The lunatic narrator of Pale Fire recalls Russian tragedies that once haunted the world. From Tsarist courts to Nazi film sets, from CIA front organizations to wartime Casablanca, the story of Nabokov’s family is the story of his century—and both are woven inextricably into his fiction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPegasus Books
    Release dateMar 5, 2013
    ISBN9781453271674
    Unavailable
    The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov
    Author

    Andrea Pitzer

    Andrea Pitzer is a journalist whose writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Outside, The Daily Beast, Vox, and Slate, among other publications. She has authored two previous books, One Long Night and The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov—both critically acclaimed. She received an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in 1994, and later studied at MIT and Harvard as an affiliate of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. She grew up in West Virginia and currently lives with her family near Washington, DC. Icebound is her most recent work.

    Related to The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

    Related ebooks

    Literary Criticism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Russian Roulette

      Feb 1, 2021

      As a longterm fan of Dostoevsky (and yes, unusually for a 19th century literary novelist, he does have a kind of fan club, many of whom are adolescents high on the thrill of first encountering his freewheeling combo of philosophical pondering and jaz

      2 min read

    • Article

      Can PTSD Be Good for You?

      Jan 7, 2018

      Can PTSD Be Good for You?
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Hisham Matar

      Dec 18, 2018

      The fact that this isn’t recognized for what it is, a magisterial work and a 20th-century masterpiece, makes me even more anxious about our times. The post A Year in Reading: Hisham Matar appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature

      Nov 21, 2023

      American readers have largely forgotten the single greatest writer to come from the Latin American Boom: Chilean novelist José Donoso. The post José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Harold Bloom, 1930–2019

      Oct 15, 2019

      Harold Bloom, 1930–2019
      1 min read

    • Article

      How Mutter Changed The Game

      Mar 31, 2021

      How Mutter Changed The Game
      11 min read

    • Article

      Jim Moore

      Jun 8, 2021

      A man in a mask and wearing a fat tank on his back is bent to the door of the parking garage.He is spraying and wiping, wiping and spraying. Another man with no mask and no hair shuffle-dances around him,gives a wave, crosses the street, tries to ope

      1 min read

    • Article

      Apply Aesthetic Pressure to the Language: An Interview with Paul Harding

      Jun 18, 2018

      This interview first appeared in Chinese at the Shanghai Review of Books on June 3, 2018. I spent my first Iowan winter day at home reading Tinkers, the 2010 Pulitzer Fiction Prize winner. Outside, snow began to fall. I poured myself a cup of hot tea

      19 min read

    • Article

      Lavender Legend

      Jul 21, 2020

      Lavender Legend
      10 min read

    • Article

      Unafraid Of The Dark

      Mar 27, 2018

      SOME YEARS AGO, in a workshop, I wrote about my sister’s self-destructive adolescence. I recounted her recklessness with boys and alcohol, the anger that erupted like a geyser inside her, and her hell-bent desire to run away—which she did by joining

      10 min read

    • Article

      How Much Did James Joyce Base “The Dead” on His Own Family?

      Oct 30, 2018

      When James Joyce wrote the “The Dead,” which eventually became the last story in Dubliners, it was as though he sought to resurrect those whom he had buried with mockery and distancing in an earlier story for the collection, “Grace.” Instead of study

      6 min read

    • Article

      Song Of The Crocodile

      Sep 24, 2020

      A Yuwaalaraay writer, storyteller and performer from the freshwater plains of the North West region of New South Wales, Simpson knows the “Crocodile Country” land very well. In her debut novel, the author tells the story of the Billymil family, who h

      1 min read

    • Article

      Derrida in Lahore

      Mar 19, 2024

      On the cold night of November 24, 1997, before Shahid disappeared forever, I thought I was his closest friend, his only confidant. We had known each other since we were children, attended primary and high school together, even gone to the same colleg

      26 min read

    • Article

      30 Books in 30 Days: Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic

      Mar 16, 2017

      In the 30 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 16 announcement of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Jane Ciabattari offers an appreciation of criti

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Bluff Stuff

      Mar 7, 2021

      The Bluff Stuff
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Book I Kept for the Cover

      Apr 13, 2018

      The Book I Kept for the Cover
      5 min read

    • Article

      Nothing Outside the Text

      Sep 27, 2021

      Close reading is sometimes slandered as brutal vivisection, but it's really a manner of possession. In the sifting through of diction and syntax, grammar and punctuation, image and figuration, there are pearls. The post Nothing Outside the Text appe

      14 min read

    • Article

      Graphic Adaptation Of 'Heart Of Darkness' Takes On Canonical Racism, Artfully

      Nov 10, 2019

      Artist Peter Kuper has adapted Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness in a way that undercuts Conrad's depiction of Africa as a place of existential horror, and centers the African characters.

      3 min read

    Reviews for The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

    4/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words