Nabokov's Dozen: A Collection of Thirteen StoriesEach of these thirteen stories is a startling evocation of a single character or happening plucked from the special world of Nabokov's imagination: Czarist Russia, Central Europe between the two World Wars, the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. However, with the exception of Mademoiselle O and First Love, these stories bear no more than an atmospheric relation to the details of Nabokov's own life. He writes: "I am no more guilty of imitating real life than real life is responsible for plagiarizing me." Nabokov, like Gogol, is one of those rare modern writers who have been able to create and populate an entire world out of their own genius and to sustain that world throughout a variety of works. These stories reveal that genius at its most intense.--Adapted from book jacket. |
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