By Vladimir Nabokov The chronology of Anna Karenin is based on a sense of artistic timing unique in the annals of literature. Upon perusing part one of the book (thirty-four small chapters making in all 135 pages), the reader is left with the impression that a number of mornings, afternoons, […]

By Vladimir Nabokov What is the key to an intelligent appreciation of the structure of Tolstoy’s huge Anna Karenina The key to its structure is consideration in terms of time. Tolstoy’s purpose, and Tolstoy’s achievement, is the synchronization of seven major lives, and it is this synchronization that we have […]

By Vladimir Nabokov Imagery may be defined as the evocation, by means of words, of something that is meant to appeal to the reader’s sense of color, or sense of outline, or sense of sound, or sense of movement, or any other sense of perception, in such a way as […]

By Vladimir Nabokov In speaking to a person, the most ordinary and neutral form of address among cultured Russians is not the surname but the first name and patronymic, Ivan Ivanovich (meaning “Ivan, son of Ivan”) or Nina Ivanovna (meaning “Nina, daughter of Ivan”). The peasant may hail another as […]

By Vladimir Nabokov No. 1 All was confusion in the Oblonski’s house In the Russian text, the word dom (house, household, home) is repeated eight times in the course of six sentences. This ponderous and solemn repetition, dom, dom, dom, tolling as it does for doomed family life (one of […]

By Vladimir Nabokov To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces : the longing for privacy and the urge to go places : introversion, that is, interest directed within oneself toward one’s own inner life of vigorous thought and fancy; and […]

By Vladimir Nabokov Socially minded Russian critics saw in Dead Souls and in The Government Inspector a condemnation of the social poshlust emanating from serf-owning bureaucratic provincial Russia and thus missed the true point. Gogol’s heroes merely happen to be Russian squires and officials; their imagined surroundings and social conditions […]

By Vladimir Nabokov “. . .a certain man who was, I daresay, not very remarkable: short he was and somewhat poxmarked and somewhat on the carroty side, and somewhat even blear-eyed and a little bald in front, with symmetrically wrinkled cheeks and the kind of complexion termed hemorrhoidal . . […]

By Vladimir Nabokov Ivan Sergeievich Turgenev was born in 1818 in Orel, Central Russia, in the family of a wealthy squire. His early youth was spent on a country estate where he was able to observe the life of the serfs and the relations between master and serf at their […]

By Vladimir Nabokov Fathers and Sons is not only the best of Turgenev’s novels, it is one of the most brilliant novels of the nineteenth century. Turgenev managed to do what he intended to do, to create a male character, a young Russian, who would affirm his—that  character’s—absence of introspection […]