Aerial View

Nabokov's art of prose, as it evolved over the half-a-century of concentrated creativity in two languages, is a prodigiously intricate phenomenon. Many of its fascinating secrets remain sealed, despite a torrent of interpretative literature. The essays that form Aerial View probe and light numerous such recesses, in many instances seldom or never visited before. The book alerts the serious student of both Russian and English works by Nabokov to the deep functional relationship between the artistic properties of his fiction (such as composition, narrative techniques, and style) and its implied philosophy of creation and afterlife. In a special appendix, many archival documents by and about Nabokov are published and annotated for the first time.