Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the

The Nile on eBay   Think, Write, Speak by Brian Boyd, Anastasia Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov Literary Trust

Originally published: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

A rich compilation of the previously uncollected Russian and English prose and interviews of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers, edited by Nabokov experts Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy."I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child": so Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote in the introduction to his volume of selected prose, Strong Opinions. Think, Write, Speak follows up where that volume left off, with a rich compilation of his uncollected prose and interviews, from a 1921 essay about Cambridge to two final interviews in 1977. The chronological order allows us to watch the Cambridge student and the fledgling Berlin reviewer and poet turn into the acclaimed Paris émigré novelist whose stature brought him to teach in America, where his international success exploded with Lolita and propelled him back to Europe. Whether his subject is Proust or Pushkin, the sport of boxing or the privileges of democracy, Nabokov's supreme individuality, his keen wit, and his alertness to the details of life illuminate the page.

Author Biography

VLADIMIR NABOKOV studied at Cambridge University, then lived in Berlin and Paris, writing in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940, he moved to America, where he taught at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard, and wrote some of his greatest works, including Speak, Memory; Lolita; and Pnin. In 1959, he returned to Europe, where he wrote Pale Fire and Ada. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977. BRIAN BOYD, University Distinguished Professor of English, University of Auckland, has published on literature, art, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology, but most of all on Vladimir Nabokov, as annotator, bibliographer, biographer, critic, editor, and translator. His work has won awards on four continents. ANASTASIA TOLSTOY is a junior research fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, where she completed a DPhil on Vladimir Nabokov. She is the co-translator, with Thomas Karshan, of Nabokov's neo-Shakespearean blank verse drama The Tragedy of Mister Morn.

Review

"Nabokov is Nabokov. He dispenses gleaming shards." —The New York Times Book Review"Immense fun. . . . Any sensitive reader will linger over the beautiful sentences with which Nabokov enriches even his most casual prose." —The Washington Post"The beauty and fascination of his views on literary and other matters rest . . . on his openness to laughter. . . . Nabokov had a lot to laugh about." —The Spectator"Now we have the full Nabokovian ex cathedra pronouncements in all their typical vim and vigour." —The Times Literary Supplement (Best Books of the Year)"Every interview Nabokov granted was a defense, not only of himself against charges of scandal and obscenity, but also of art, the imagination, and literature itself. He devoted his life to the shiver in the spine that passes from writer to reader, and it's there that he lives on." —Financial Times"The greatest pleasure in reading this book is the impression you get that you're opening your presents underneath the Christmas tree. . . . Boyd and Tolstoy put together an amazing variety of tidbits. . . . A lovely blend of literary elements and of personal details . . . you feel particular pleasure when you get a glimpse of the man hiding behind the famous writer." —Transatlantica"A must-read . . .  Nabokov notices (and is often amused by) everything. . . . Boyd and Tolstoy have brought out a volume that no Nabokov fan can overlook." —The Post and Courier

Review Quote

"Immense fun . . . Any sensitive reader will linger over the beautiful sentences with which Nabokov enriches even his most casual prose." -- Michael Dirda, The Washington Post "A must-read . . . Nabokov notices (and is often amused by) everything . . . He is forever smart and associative, satisfying from the smallest bit to the largest chunk . . . Boyd and Tolstoy have brought out a volume that no Nabokov fan can overlook. We have before us a genius scrambling to patch together a living in the volume's early years, then a genius living with, and mostly reveling in, the fame he earned." -- Catherine Holmes, The Post and Courier "Gives us a window into the earlier decades of Nabokov's life . . . This new collection is an expansive record of Nabokov's worldview and aesthetic philosophy, but one particularly fascinating element of Think, Write, Speak is the insight it gives us into how Nabokov, staunchly opposed to the politicization of literature, navigated being a public explainer of Russian arts and letters in the midst of the Cold War." --Jennifer Wilson, The New Republic "Nabokov is Nabokov. He dispenses gleaming shards . . . The best passage in Think, Write, Speak [is] one that, were I a tattoo person, I would consider advertising on my forearm." -- Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review "Every interview Nabokov granted was a defense, not only of himself against charges of scandal and obscenity, but also of art, the imagination, and literature itself. He devoted his life to the shiver in the spine that passes from writer to reader, and it's there that he lives on." --Christian Lorentzen, Financial Times "Vladimir Nabokov's opinions . . . are of compelling interest because--paradoxically--he regularly and accurately insisted that his novels sent no message, made no moral case, presented no argument. The beauty and fascination of his views on literary and other matters rest, I think, on his openness to laughter. . . . Nabokov had a lot to laugh about." -- Philip Hensher, The Spectator "For those of us who are Vladimir Nabokov completists perhaps we finally have closure . . . Now we have the full Nabokovian ex cathedra pronouncements in all their typical vim and vigour, to be relished all the more because Nabokov insisted on writing the replies to all questions posed." --William Boyd, The Times Literary Supplement (Best Books of the Year 2019) "Scores of interviews reveal Nabokov's sly wit and powerful opinions . . . An informative introduction places the selections in the context of Nabokov's life and writing career . . . A treat for Nabokov admirers." -- Kirkus Reviews

Excerpt from Book

1 Cambridge (Essay, 1921) There''s a lovely saying: abroad, even the stars are tinny. Isn''t that true? Nature may be beautiful overseas, but it is not ours, and we find it soulless and artificial. One needs to gaze at it persistently to begin to feel it and love it, whereas at first something of the greenhouse wafts from the unfamiliar trees, and all the birds seem as if on springs, and the sunset looks no better than a rather dry watercolor. So I felt when I rode into this provincial little English town, where, like a great soul in a small body, an ancient university lives its proud life. The gothic beauty of its numerous buildings (called colleges) stretches gracefully upward; gold clock-faces glow atop precipitous towers; through gaps in age-old gates decorated with stuccoed crests, rectangles of lawn gleam sunnily green; while opposite these very gates modern shopwindows have their multicolored displays, blasphemous as colored-pencil doodles sketched in the margins of a sacred book. Back and forth along the narrow streets dart bicycles covered in mud, ringing their bells, motorcycles cackle, and, wherever you look, all around swarm the kings of Cambridge town--the students: their dress ties flicker like striped crossing barriers, their extraordinarily crumpled, sinuous trousers flicker in all shades of gray, from whitish and cloud-colored to wild dark-gray trousers wonderfully matching the color of the neighboring walls. In the mornings, grabbing notebooks and regulation cloaks in a heap, these doughty lads hurry to their lectures, making their way single file into the lecture halls, sleepily listen to the mumblings of a wise mummy on the rostrum, and, awakening suddenly, signal their approval through the pulsating stamping of their feet when, amid the dull flow of academic speech, a flash of wit splashes like a fish. After lunch, pulling on their lilac, green, and blue jackets, they fly off like crows in peacock feathers to the plush fields where balls will thwack until dusk; or to the river, which flows with Venetian languor past the gray and tawny walls and cast-iron lattices--and then Cambridge empties for a while. The burly policeman yawns, leaning against a lamppost, two old women in funny black hats prattle at the crossing, a shaggy dog snoozes in a rhombus of sunlight. . . . By five o''clock everything wakes up again, crowds throng to the tea shops, where toxically bright pastries glisten on every little table like fly-agaric mushrooms. Sometimes I sit in a corner and look out on all of these smooth, no doubt very pleasant faces, but somehow always reminding me of a shaving soap advertisement, and then I suddenly become so bored, so weary, that I almost want to howl to break the windows. . . . There''s a kind of glass wall between them and us Russians. They have their own round and solid world, like a scrupulously colored-in globe. Their souls lack that inspired whirlwind, that throb, that radiance, that dancing frenzy, that anger and tenderness, which carries us, God knows, to what heavens and what abysses. We have moments when the clouds are on our shoulders, the sea knee-high--and our souls roam free! To an Englishman this is incomprehensible, novel, perhaps even alluring. If he does get drunk and riotous, his riotousness is banal and hearty, so that even the observers of order look at him and simply smile, knowing he will never cross a certain line. And on the other hand, not even the headiest drunkenness will make him flow with feeling, bare his chest, throw his hat on the ground. . . . At any time signs of frankness jar him. You might be speaking to a friend about this or that, about strikes and steeplechases, when you ingenuously blurt out that you feel you''d give every drop of blood to see again some bog near Petersburg--but to utter such thoughts is indecent; he''ll look at you as if you''d whistled in church. It turns out that in Cambridge there''s a whole list of the simplest things that by tradition a student must not do. You shouldn''t, for example, take a rowboat on the river--hire a punt or raft; you shouldn''t wear a hat in the street--the city is ours after all, there''s no need to stand on ceremony; you shouldn''t shake people''s hands, and God forbid you greet a professor--he''ll only smile confusedly, mumble something, stumble. There is no shortage of these rules, and a newcomer will inevitably put his foot in it from time to time. If a wild foreigner nonetheless behaves in his own way, at first people will marvel at him--what an oddball, a barbarian--but then they will start to avoid him, to not recognize him on the street. Sometimes, it is true, a kind soul with a weakness for exotic creatures will come your way, but he will only approach you in a secluded spot, fearfully looking around him, and, having satisfied his curiosity, will disappear forever. This is why, at times, your heart swells with sorrow, feeling that it won''t find a true friend here. And then everything seems dull: the eyeglasses of the nimble old woman whose room you rent, and the room itself, with its dirty-red sofa, gloomy fireplace, absurd little vases on their absurd little shelves, and the sounds rising from the street, the cry of the newspaper boys: Paypa! Paypa! . . . But one can get used to anything, adapt, and learn to notice beauty in what''s strange. Wandering on a smoky spring evening around the town, becalmed, you sense that there exists, beyond the speckle and bustle of our life, an altogether different life in Cambridge, the life of beguiling bygones. You know its large, gray eyes pensively and dispassionately look upon the caprices of a new generation, just as a hundred years ago they looked upon that limping, effeminate student Byron, and on his tamed bear, who remembered all too well his native pine forest and that cunning little peasant in fabled Muscovy. Eight centuries have flown by: the Tatars swooped down like locusts; Ivan thundered; turmoil stirred across old Rus'', like a portentous dream; and then new tsars rose up like golden mists; Peter toiled, hacked with abandon and emerged from the forest into the great wide world;--and here all the while these walls, these towers, stood immutable. And in just the same way, year in, year out, smooth-faced youths gathered to the chiming of the bells in the dining halls, where, just as today, rays of light would stream through the stained glass of the high windows, daubing the tiles with pale amethysts, and these youths would joke around in just the same way, except perhaps that their talk would be fierier, their beer headier. . . . I think about this, as I stroll along the hushed streets on a smoky spring evening. I come out onto the river. I stand for a long time on a little pearl-gray arched bridge, and not far off, another little bridge just like it forms a complete circle with its crisp, charming reflection. Weeping willows, old elms, festively luxuriant chestnut trees rise up here and there, as though embroidered in green silk on the canvas of a fading and tender sky. It smells faintly of lilacs and slimy water. . . . And now bells begin to chime through the whole city. . . . Round, silvery sounds, distant, near, drift by, intercrossing in the sky; and, having hung like a magic net above the crenellated towers for a few moments, they disperse, melt lingeringly, near, distant, into the narrow, misty lanes, into the beautiful night sky, into my heart. . . . And, gazing at the tranquil water, where subtle reflections bloom like designs on porcelain, I begin to think still more deeply, about much, about the whims of fate, about my homeland, and about the fact that my best memories grow older every day, and so far nothing can replace them. . . . 2 Rupert Brooke (Essay, 1921) I watched them; I admired them for a long time; barely flashing, they swam, swam tirelessly back and forth behind the glass barrier, in the haze of the still water, pale green, like slumber, like eternity, like the inner world of a blind man. They were huge, round, colorful: their porcelain scales seemed as if painted in bright colors by a meticulous Chinaman. I looked upon them as in a dream, spellbound by the mysterious music of their flowing, delicate movements. In between these gently shimmering giants darted multicolored fry--tiny specters, reminiscent of the softest butterflies, the most translucent dragonflies. And in the half-gloom of the aquarium, as I watched all these fantastical fish, gliding, breathing, staring wide-eyed into their pale-green eternity, I recalled the cool, meandering verses of the English poet who sensed in them, in these supple, iridescent fish, a profound symbol of our existence. Rupert Brooke . . . This name is not yet known on the Continent, let alone in Russia. Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) is represented by two slim volumes, in which around eighty poems are collected. His work has a rare, captivating quality: a kind of radiant liquidity--not for nothing did he serve in the navy, not for nothing does his very name mean "brook" in English. This Tyutchev-like love for everything streaming, burbling, brightly chilled, is so strikingly, so convincingly expressed in most of his poems that you want not to read them, but, rather, to suck them up through a straw, to press them to your face like dewy flowers, to lower yourself into them as into the freshness of an azure lake. For Brooke, the world is a watery deep, "A fluctuant mutable world and dim, / Where wavering masses bulge and gape / Mysterious. . . . The strange soft-handed depth subdues / Drowned colour there, but black to hues, / As death to living, decomposes-- / Red darkness of the heart of roses, / Blue brilliant from dead starless skies, / And gold that lies behind the eyes, / The unknown unnameable sightless white /

Details ISBN1101873701 Author Vladimir Nabokov Literary Trust Short Title Think, Write, Speak Pages 576 Language English ISBN-10 1101873701 ISBN-13 9781101873700 Format Paperback Subtitle Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor Series Vintage International Year 2021 Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2021-02-09 NZ Release Date 2021-02-09 US Release Date 2021-02-09 Place of Publication New York UK Release Date 1900-01-01 Publisher Random House USA Inc Publication Date 2021-02-09 Imprint Vintage Books Edited by Brian Boyd DEWEY 818.5209 Illustrations 7 ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT Audience General We've got this

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