The World of Nabokov's Stories

A “Choice Magazine” Outstanding Academic Book of the Year. A century after his birth, Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) remains controversial, provocative, and “cool.” Yet while he receives acclaim as a major American writer, few of his admirers in the West know the unique place he occupies in his native Russian tradition. In this captivating interpretation of Nabokov's career through the prism of his short fiction, Maxim D. Shrayer explores how Nabokov eclipsed the achievements of the great Russian masters of the short story, Anton Chekhov and others, with whom he maintained a dialogic relationship even as he became — in exile from Russia and his native tradition — an American writer. Maxim D. Shrayer, a bilingual author and translator, is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College. Born in Moscow in 1967 to a writer’s family, Shrayer emigrated to the United States in 1987. He has authored over ten books in English and Russian, among them the literary memoirs “Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story” and “Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration,” the story collection “Yom Kippur in Amsterdam,” and the Holocaust study “I SAW IT.” Shrayer’s “Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature” won a 2007 National Jewish Book Award, and in 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Visit Shrayer’s website at www.shrayer.com.

Reviews:

“A brilliant reading of Nabokov's stories.” --Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Comparing the stories to those of Nabokov's 'older contemporaries'--Chekhov and Ivan Bunin--Shrayer places Nabokov squarely in the Russian literary tradition by painstakingly examining the stories' narrative components. In an approach that would no doubt have pleased Nabokov himself, Shrayer examines the stories through models of the reading process, incorporating Nabokov's own ideas of how one 'reads.' An important addition to Nabokov scholarship.” --Library Journal

“Shrayer's thoughtful and well-documented analysis of the Nabokov-Bunin relationship illuminates an important chapter in the development of twentieth-century Russian literature. His study as a whole will reward all who are keen readers of Vladimir Nabokov and of the Russian short story itself.” --Russian Review