Stalking Nabokov

At the age of twentyone, Brian Boyd wrote a thesis on Vladimir Nabokov that the famous author called brilliant. After gaining exclusive access to the writers archives, he wrote a twopart, awardwinning biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991). This collection features essays written by Boyd since completing the biography, incorporating material he gleaned from his research as well as new discoveries and formulations.Boyd confronts Nabokovs life, career, and legacy; his art, science, and thought; his subtle humor and puzzlelike storytelling; his complex psychological portraits; and his inheritance from, reworking of, and affinities with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Machado de Assis. Boyd offers new ways of reading Nabokovs best Englishlanguage works: Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and the unparalleled autobiography, Speak, Memory, and he discloses otherwise unknown information about the authors world. Sharing his personal reflections, Boyd recounts the adventures, hardships, and revelations of researching Nabokovs biography and his unusual finds in the archives, including materials still awaiting publication. The first to focus on Nabokovs metaphysics, Boyd cautions against their being used as the key to unlock all of the authors secrets, showing instead the many other rooms in Nabokovs castle of fiction that need exploring, such as his humor, narrative invention, and psychological insight into characters and readers alike. Appreciating Nabokov as novelist, memoirist, poet, translator, scientist, and individual, Boyd helps us understand more than ever the authors multifaceted genius.