Blue Evenings in Berlin: Nabokov's Short Stories of the 1920s (New York University studies in comparative literature ; v. 9)

BLUE EVENINGS IN BERLIN by Marina Turkevich Naumann "BLUE EVENINGS IN BERLIN is...a great success and is one of the very few works of Nabokov criticism known to me which every Nabokov admirer should read and own." ---Julian Moynahan, from the Foreword ~Until his death on July 2, 1977, Nabokov was considered the greatest living author of our time. Yet until now there has been no comprehensive scholarly work in Russian or English, on his first period and certainly none which has viewed it within the context of his entire life work. ~The 1920's were the watershed of Nabokov's literary career, when he decided to devote his life to writing and turned from translations and jejune plays and poetry to serious prose work. Although he completed three novels during this period, the twenty-two Russian short stories he simultaneously published proved to be the most promising and revealing of his early compositions. This volume provides the first detailed interpretation of these fundamental works, presenting parallel Russian and English texts, including several of Dr. Naumann's own translations. ~In "Blue Evenings in Berlin", the author introduces Nabokov in the early days of his emigration and discusses the broad artistic manner which is so characteristic of his fiction in those formative years. She then focuses on each story, identifying what Nabokov termed "the special pattern or unique coloration" of his art. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Marina Turkevich Naumann is Assistant Professor of Russian at Douglass College of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. A graduate of Wellesley College, she received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Naumann has also contributed many articles on Russian literature to journals such as Russian Language Journal, Germano-Slavica, and Slavic and East European Journal.