About this item
A startling and revelatory examination of Nabokov’s life and works—notably Pale Fire and Lolita—bringing new insight into one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic authors. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fleeing France with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis. He repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering to write artful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in the English language really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so many critics? Using information from newly-declassified intelligence files and recovered military history, journalist Andrea Pitzer argues that far from being a proponent of art for art’s sake, Vladimir Nabokov managed to hide disturbing history in his fiction—history that has gone unnoticed for decades.
About the Author
Andrea Pitzer is the author of ICEBOUND: SHIPWRECKED AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, the story of William Barents' three voyages to the Arctic in the 1590s. Published by Scribner in January 2021, ICEBOUND was featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and received a starred review from Booklist. Her second book, ONE LONG NIGHT: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF CONCENTRATION CAMPS (Little, Brown, 2017) , covers the wrenching story of mass civilian detention from the 1890s to the present. It received a starred review from Kirkus and was named a top history book of the year by Smithsonian Magazine. Her first book, THE SECRET HISTORY OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV (Pegasus, 2013) , received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal. Andrea's writing has appeared many places in print and online, from the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, Outside, the Daily Beast, GQ, Vox, Slate, and USA Today to Longreads, Lapham's Quarterly, and McSweeney's. She founded Nieman Storyboard, the narrative nonfiction site of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.Find her on Twitter at @andreapitzer, like her Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/andreapitzerauthor/, and visit her website at http://www.andreapitzer.com.
