Nabokov’s Canon (2016)

Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1964) and its accompanying Commentary, along with Ada, or Ardor (1969), his densely allusive late English-language novel, have appeared nearly inscrutable to many interpreters of his work. If not outright failures, they are often considered relatively unsuccessful curiosities. In Bozovic’s insightful study, these key texts reveal Nabokov’s ambitions to reimagine a canon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western masterpiesces with Russian literature as a central, rather than marginal, strain [of his work].