Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement

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Adopting the modernist master Vladimir Nabokov as its guide, Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement is an exploration of the radically changing social, historical, technological, and literary culture of the early 20th century, a time when modes of communication and transportation, especially, were changing society in drastic and profound ways. Across seventy microchapters that are by turn serious, ironic, informative, and playful, and which take on topics such as automobiles, trains, airplanes, electricity, elevators, advertisements, telegraphs, and telephones, Yuri Leving offers new ways to understand Nabokov, Russian literature, and technology, modernism, and world material culture. Nabokovs writings are analyzed against a broad context of prose and poetry and from the point of view of what Leving calls the poetics of urbanism in literature. Nabokov in Motion is a ground-breaking exploration of urban and material themes in literature and creates a complex and vibrant cultural fabric of which Nabokov is the master weaver.

Reviews

Leving has broken the mould of Nabokov scholarship. He gives us a dynamic Nabokov who embraced modernity rather than hid from it. The visual richness of this book is stunning; it is both the highest form of scholarship and a kind of pedagogic aid to the experience of travel in Russian modernity. * Eric Naiman, University of California, Berkeley, USA, and author of Nabokov, Perversely *
What emerges through an accumulation of a very great number of facts and examples in Nabokov in Motion is a feeling that one has almost visited the world of the early 1900s and felt firsthand the thrill of contemplating the final glory of rail travel and the arrival of automobiles and airplanes as the transportation of the future. Yuri Leving does an excellent job of subjecting bygone days to philological science while completely avoiding the all-too-common structuralist flaw of stripping the old world of all of its charm. Here, charm is ever-present. * Stephen H. Blackwell, former president of the International Nabokov Society and the co-editor of Fine Lines: Vladimir Nabokovs Scientific Art *
This book is absolutely brilliant. The entire Russian literature of the early 20th century (including the nearly forgotten authors) is analyzed in the context of symbols of urbanization and new industrial aesthetics. Masterly layering associations, intersections of images, and plots, Leving convincingly demonstrates Russian literature as a single metatext. * Alexandra Selivanova, Director of the Avant-Guard Center Museum, Moscow, Russia *

Author Bio

Yuri Leving is University Research Professor at Dalhousie University, Canada. He is the author of nine books and editor of six volumes, including Shades of Laura: Vladimir Nabokovs Last Novel The Original of Laura (2013); Anatomy of a Short Story: Nabokovs Puzzles, Codes, Signs and Symbols (Bloomsbury, 2012), and Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl Vladimir Nabokovs Novel in Art and Design (2013). Leving is the founding editor of the Nabokov Online Journal and served as a commentator on the first authorized Russian edition of The Collected Works of Vladimir Nabokov in five volumes.