Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Nabokov's parody, half poem and half commentary on the poem, deals with the escapades of the deposed king of Zemala in a New England college town.

The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished emigre poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write--a book very much like The Gift itself.

Here, for the first time, the stories of one of the century's greatest prose stylists are collected in a single, comprehensive volume. Written from the early 1920s - the years of his exile from Russia - to the mid-1950s, when he abandoned the story form and turned to his English-language masterpieces Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, these stories reveal the fascinating progress of Nabokov's early development as they remind us that we are in the presence...

Stanley Kubrick's sixth film is a brilliant, sly adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's celebrated yet infamous 1955 novel. It chronicles a middle-aged literature professor's unusual and doomed sexual passion/obsession for a seductively precocious pubescent "nymphet" named Lolita. Thanks to the film industry's production code, the film is mostly suggestive, with numerous double entendres and metaphoric sexual situations, while the story has been transformed...