Fans of Nabokov, and certainly scholars, will be captivated by these intimate expressions of the writer’s heart and mind.
Portrait of a marriage, revealed through a legendary writer’s letters to his wife.
From the moment Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) met Véra Slonim (1902-1991) in 1923, he sent her passionate letters, detailing the events of his days (meals eaten, hours slept, butterflies collected), the process of his work, and the sights and sounds of wherever he was. Voronina (Russian and Eurasian Studies/Bard Coll.), who served as deputy director of the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, and Nabokov biographer Boyd (English/Univ. of Auckland; On the Origin of Stories, 2009, etc.) have amassed and translated this copious trove, contextualizing it with a lengthy introduction and hundreds of pages of notes. The letters, some containing drawings, puzzles, and word games, offer a revealing portrait of the Nabokovs’ marriage; the writer’s relationships with his son, mother, editors, publishers, and friends; and, by inference, a portrait of Véra. With “an intense need for privacy” and desire to control her husband’s reputation, she gradually and reluctantly made his letters available to Boyd and her own biographer, Stacy Schiff, but destroyed her letters to him. Moreover, his letters from 1932 never were found and are represented here by transcriptions of portions that Véra read to Boyd. Nabokov’s letters are filled with such effusive declarations of love and “quirky Russian endearments” that one feels almost voyeuristic in reading them: “My poochums, pooch-chums,” “Pussykins,” “My grand ciel rose,” “my greenikin.” “My darling, my sweetest love, my darling,” he wrote, even while in the midst of an affair with another woman. Many letters date from their separation in 1937, when Vladimir fled Germany, leaving his wife, mother, and son to follow him. Véra, exhausted and “overstrung,” subjected her husband to a “long-distance chess game,” pitting her desires against his. She won, as usual.
Fans of Nabokov, and certainly scholars, will be captivated by these intimate expressions of the writer’s heart and mind.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-59336-8
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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