This time from The New Republic:

 

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112712/two-new-nabokov-books-reviewed-alexander-nazaryan

 

“…So instead of treating Nabokov as a coddled aesthete removed from the concerns of the twentieth century, Pitzer depicts him as fully engaged with the concerns of the world—though he was far too courtly, too genteel, to shout his convictions from the rooftops. Given how much scholarship concerns Nabokov’s oeuvre, it is bold to contend, as Pitzer does in her introduction, that “a whole layer of meaning in his work has vanished.” That statement had me sharpening my critical daggers. But by the end, Pitzer managed to pretty much make her case, mostly by not belaboring the point, though also never deviating from it. Sure, you can read Pale Fire without knowing that Kinbote’s Nova Zembla—the possibly made-up magical kingdom that forms the novel’s parallel universe—is modeled after Novaya Zemlya, where the USSR was testing nuclear weapons. But no reading ever suffered from a fullness of context.”