This landmark new collection brings together the best of the poetry of Vladimir Nabokov,
one of the twentieth century's greatest writers and author of Lolita and Pale
Fire. It includes an extensive number of poems that have never appeared in English
before, newly translated from the Russian by his son Dmitri Nabokov.
These masterly poems span the decades of Nabokov's career, from 'Music', written in 1914
and probably Nabokov's first recorded poem, to the short, playful 'To Vera', composed in
1974. 'The University Poem', one of Nabokov's major poetic works, is here in English for the
first time: an extraordinary autobiographical poem looking back at his time at Cambridge,
with its dinners, games, girls and memories, it is suffused with rich description, wit and
verbal dexterity. Included too are the surreally comic 'A Literary Dinner', the enchanting,
lyrical 'Eve', the wryly humorous 'An Evening of Russian Poetry' and a meditation on the act
of creation, 'Tolstoy', as well as verse written on America, lepidoptery, sport, love and
Nabokov's Russian homeland.
