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I would like to announce the publication of my new book, Vladimir
Nabokov
and the Art of Play, by Oxford University Press. The book is the result
of nine years of work and draws extensively on the untranslated Russian
material and on the restricted manuscripts in the Berg and in the
Library
of Congress. I begin from Nabokov's statement, in the essay "Play" of
1925,
tat "everything in the world plays", and I argue that play was Nabokov's
signature theme. I trace the idea of art as play back to German
aesthetics
(Kant, Schiller, and Nietzsche), and show how Nabokov came into contact
with those ideas in his early years: through such figures as Maximilian
Voloshin, Iulii Aikhenvald, Fyodor Stepun, and other emigres in Berlin.
I then show the extraordinarily intricate thinking on play in Nabokov's
writing, in relation to faith, make-believe, chance, fate, work,
idleness, Marxism, desire, freedom, and scholarship, and establish a
series of contextual readings exploring his relation to Bely, Carroll,
Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky, Marx, Chernyshevsky, Pushkin, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake,
and Alexander Pope. The book therefore offers a new and fully
researched critical reading of Nabokov from 1917 through to 1977; it
also argues that Nabokov's novels form the fullest and most
sophisticated
view of play ever achieved. Perhaps members of the list may consider
recommending the book to their university libraries?
I attach the link to the OUP UK website:
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199603985.do
The book can also be bought a little more cheaplu through amazon.
OUP US and Canadian publication is expected in a month or so.
I would be glad to be contacted about the book and the ideas in it.
Dr Thomas Karshan
Leverhulme Research Fellow
English Department
Queen Mary, University of London