Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics Book

Vladimir Nabokovâ??s â??Western choiceâ?â??his exile to the West after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolutionâ??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 (1899â??1977) are highly relevant to the political transformation under way in Russia today. Khrushcheva, a Russian living in America, finds in Nabokovâ??s novels a useful guide for Russiaâ??s integration into the globalized world. Now one of Nabokovâ??s â??Westernâ? characters herself, she discusses the cultural and social realities of contemporary Russia that he foresaw a half-century earlier. In Pale Fire; Ada, or Ardor; Pnin; and other works, Nabokov reinterpreted the traditions of Russian fiction, shifting emphasis from personal misery and communal life to the notion of forging oneâ??s own â??happyâ? destiny. In the twenty-first century Russia faces a similar challenge, Khrushcheva contends, and Nabokovâ??s work reveals how skills may be acquired to cope with the advent of democracy, capitalism, and open borders. Read More