Overview

Nabokov's Shakespeare is a comprehensive study of an important and interesting literary relationship. It explores the many and deep ways in which the works of Shakespeare, the greatest writer of the English language, penetrate the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, one of the finest English prose stylists of the twentieth century. As a Russian youth, Nabokov read all of Shakespeare, in English. He claimed a shared birthday with the Bard, and some of his most highly regarded novels (Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada) are infused with Shakespeare and Shakespeareanisms. Nabokov uses Shakespeare and Shakespeare's works in a surprisingly wide variety of ways, from the most casual references to deep thematic links. Schuman provides a taxonomy of Nabokov's Shakespeareanisms; a quantitative analysis of Shakespeare in Nabokov; an examination of Nabokov's Russian works, his early English novels, the non-novelistic writings (poetry, criticism, stories), Nabokov's major works, and his final novels; and a discussion of the nature of literary relationships and influence. With a Foreword by Brian Boyd.

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9781628924268

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Reviews

Shakespeare and Nabokov are literary giants in their respective cultural traditions. In his spectacular Nabokov's Shakespeare, Samuel Schuman presents a remarkable face-off and solves several of the remaining riddles about the writers' literary enigmas. -- Yuri Leving, Professor of Russian Literature, Dalhousie University, Canada, and Editor of the Nabokov Online Journal. Samuel Schuman has provided a fine-grained analysis of Shakespearean motifs and allusions in Nabokov's work. His careful interpretation of Shakespearean references offers fresh illumination on such major works as Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada. -- Julian W. Connolly, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Virginia, USA

Shakespeare and Nabokov are literary giants in their respective cultural traditions. In his spectacular Nabokov's Shakespeare, Samuel Schuman presents a remarkable face-off and solves several of the remaining riddles about the writers' literary enigmas. -- Yuri Leving, Professor of Russian Literature, Dalhousie University, Canada, and Editor of the Nabokov Online Journal. Samuel Schuman has provided a fine-grained analysis of Shakespearean motifs and allusions in Nabokov's work. His careful interpretation of Shakespearean references offers fresh illumination on such major works as Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada. -- Julian W. Connolly, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Virginia, USA Nabokov's Shakespeare provides readers with a very fantastical banquet, as Benedick puts it in Much Ado about Nothing. This exciting, accessible, wide-ranging volume sparkles with the glint of literary discovery as it traces the many ways in which one great writer can read another. Samuel Schuman confidently explores the infinite variety of Nabokov's evocations, citations, homages, parodies, and translations of Shakespeare, across the entire range of his Russian and especially his English works. After reading Nabokov's Shakespeare, you will better appreciate English literature's two most brilliant wordsmiths. And you will indeed know Nabokov's Shakespeare-including the themes of loss, banishment, and art's transcendent magic that he shared with his predecessor, the particular scenes from the plays that he staged and restaged in his own works, and even his favorite line in all of Shakespeare's writing. Schuman's book offers endless riches to Nabokov scholars, and to anyone who simply loves literature. -- Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Associate Professor of English, College of the Holy Cross, co-editor of the Vladimir Nabokov Electronic Forum (NABOKV-L), and past president of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society Samuel Schuman is one of the most trustworthy, measured, and responsible Nabokov critics whose scholarly credibility in both Shakespearean and Nabokovian circles makes him singularly suited to account for Nabokov's insistent and purposive use of Shakespeare's works in the texture and structure of his own. And Schuman's project is a very timely one: all previous work on Nabokov and Shakespeare has been done mainly through a handful of essays, all of which are well done but deliver only glancing blows to the topic. The great strength of this book is the comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare's presence in Nabokov's work, and Nabokov's Shakespeare would be worth buying just for Schuman's wide-ranging and convincing explication of the long Shakespearean discussion and the Krug/Hamlet parallels in Bend Sinister. The book's other strengths are Schuman's conscientious scholarship, clear principles of organization and argument, and the writing's stout resistance of academic hyperbole and unproductive theoretical complexity. -- Zoran Kuzmanovich, Professor of English, Davidson University, USA, and editor of Nabokov Studies A well-known Nabokov scholar, who also wrote Vladimir Nabokov: A Reference Guide (1979), Schuman has done a fine job of explicating Shakespeare's role in Nabokov's oeuvre. Nabokov's earliest reference to the Bard is the 1924 poem Shakespeare. That work was soon followed by a five-act play, The Tragedy of Mr. Morn, that echoes Shakespeare in its structure, form, and intonations ... This is solid scholarship on an intriguing writer. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -- D. B. Johnson, University of California, Santa Barbara CHOICE

Author Information

Samuel Schuman served as the Garrey Carruthers Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of New Mexico, and Chancellor Emeritus of the University of Minnesota, Morris and the University of North Carolina, Asheville, USA. He is past President of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society and author of Vladimir Nabokov: A Reference Guide. He has published extensively on Nabokov as well as on British Renaissance Drama.

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