Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.
You read Lolita sprawling limply in your chair, ravished, overcome,
nodding scandalized assent
*Observer*
A masterpiece. One of the great works of art of our age
*Independent*
His command of words, his joy in them, his comic and ecstatic use
of them...makes reading his work such an intense joy
*Daily Telegraph*
Lolita is more the shocking because it is both intensely lyrical
and wildly funny ... a Medusa's head with trick paper snakes
*Time*
A great novel ... It widens our own humanity
*Guardian*
There's no funnier monster in modern literature than poor, doomed
Humbert Humbert. Going to hell in his company would always be worth
the ride
*Independent*
Redeeming, spendid, headlong, endlessly comic and evocative
*John Updike*
Rapturous ... incendiary
*Time Out*
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