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Bend Sinister

Bend Sinister

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Bend Sinister

by Nabokov, Vladimir

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  • good
  • Paperback
Condition
Good
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About This Item

London: Corgi Books, 1962. Mass Market Paperback. Good. A few ink notes and underlines. Yellowing pages. Wear to cover and tear on spine. 222 pages.

Synopsis

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins. The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri. Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions--which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.

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Details

Bookseller
Pistil Books Online US (US)
Bookseller's Inventory #
144942
Title
Bend Sinister
Author
Nabokov, Vladimir
Format/Binding
Mass Market Paperback
Book Condition
Used - Good
Quantity Available
1
Binding
Paperback
Publisher
Corgi Books
Place of Publication
London
Date Published
1962
Bookseller catalogs
Fiction;

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About the Seller

Pistil Books Online

Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
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Seattle, Washington

About Pistil Books Online

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Mass Market
Mass market paperback books, or MMPBs, are printed for large audiences cheaply. This means that they are smaller, usually 4...
Spine
The outer portion of a book which covers the actual binding. The spine usually faces outward when a book is placed on a shelf....

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