Vladimir Nabokov

Mary is a gripping tale of youth, first love, and nostalgia--Nabokov's first novel.In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of seriocomic Russian migrs, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair.His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the...

The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career.It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative:the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished migr poet living in Berlin, who...

Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star herself. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious...

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, could not bear to destroy her husband's last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son....

Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful...

Nabokov's fourth novel, The Eye is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Nabokov's protagonist, Smurov, is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian migr living in prewar Berlin, who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband,...