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Nabokov, Collected Poems

Though Nabokov is best known as a novelist, he was first a poet, and continued to write poetry his whole life, first in Russian, and then in English. His poems, of great interest and value in their own right, also cast light on his novels, written as they are in a poetic prose that draws on many of the images and rhythms of the poems. Until now, the fullest edition of Nabokov's poems available in English was the 1970 Poems and Problems, overseen by Nabokov, which included thirty-nine of his Russian poems alongside translations by Nabokov, together with fourteen of the poems Nabokov had written originally in English. This edition has been out of print for a long time. The new volume, which Karshan has edited, reprints Poems and Problems in full alongside many of Nabokov's Russian poems newly translated by Nabokov's son Dmitri, together with the nine English poems not included in Poems and Problems. Karshan oversaw the texts of all these poems, and added to them detailed bibliographic notes, giving details of variants and conditions of publication based on a comparison of the poems in their various book-publications, in the pages of the original Russian émigré and American journals, and in the manuscripts held in the New York Public Library. To this he has added a 10,000-word introduction setting the poems in the context of Nabokov's novels and of Nabokov's poetic influences, and offering a series of new interpretations of the poems and their formal properties.