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Despair
by Nabokov, Vladimir
- Used
- very good
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- Very Good/Acceptable
- Seller
-
Didcot, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966. First edition hard cover in very good condition, with an unclipped dust jacket in acceptable condition. From the collection of W.L. Webb, the Guardian's literary editor for many years, ownership penned to FEP. General shelf and handling wear, including tanning and foxing to cover, inside and out, along with creasing and wear to cover, corners, edges and folds. Minor chips and nicks to edges, scoring to front. Pageblock tanned, leading into pastedowns, endpapers and page edges. Boards in fine condition, light wear only, pages are tightly bound, and content is unmarked. CN. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Acceptable. Used.
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
- PsychoBabel & Skoob Books
(GB)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 547505
- Title
- Despair
- Author
- Nabokov, Vladimir
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Very Good
- Jacket Condition
- Acceptable
- Edition
- First Edition
- Publisher
- Weidenfeld & Nicolson
- Place of Publication
- London
- Date Published
- 1966
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About the Seller
PsychoBabel & Skoob Books
Biblio member since 2005
Didcot, Oxfordshire
About PsychoBabel & Skoob Books
Didcot, Oxfordshire UK Bookseller specialising in professional collections. Psychology, Psychiatry, Medicine, Law, Literature, Theatre etc
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Fine
- A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...
- Acceptable
- A non-traditional book condition description that generally refers to a book in readable condition, although no standard exists...
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
- Edges
- The collective of the top, fore and bottom edges of the text block of the book, being that part of the edges of the pages of a...
- First Edition
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