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The Tragedy of Mister Morn

Part of Vintage International

Author Vladimir Nabokov
Introduction by Thomas Karshan
Translated by Anastasia Tolstoy, Thomas Karshan
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Paperback
$15.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Dec 03, 2013 | 176 Pages | 978-0-307-95066-6
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  • English > Comparative Literature > Modern Drama
  • English > Comparative Literature: Russia and Eastern Europe > Russian
  • English > Literature > American Literature – Drama
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Vladimir Nabokov’s earliest major work, written when he was twenty-four, is a full-length play in verse of Shakespearean beauty and richness.

The story of an incognito king whose love for the wife of a banished revolutionary brings on the chaos the king has fought to prevent, this five-act play was never published in Nabokov’s lifetime and lay in manuscript until it appeared in a Russian literary journal in 1997. It is an astonishingly precocious work, in exquisite verse, touching for the first time on what would become this great writer’s major themes: intense sexual desire and jealousy, the elusiveness of happiness, the power of the imagination, and the eternal battle between truth and fantasy. The Tragedy of Mister Morn is Nabokov’s major response to the Russian Revolution, which he had lived through, but it approaches the events of 1917 through the prism of Shakespearean tragedy.
 
Translated by Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan

“A road map to what this dazzling sorcerer of words would later create.” —The New York Times
 
“Its speeches are bright with Nabokovian gems. . . . Mister Morn [is] enticingly predictive of Nabokov’s great work. The flutter of magic, the avuncular twinkle, the B-movie danger–it’s all here.” —The New Yorker

“If the unfinished novel The Original of Laura revealed to the world the last embers of Nabokov’s genius, The Tragedy of Mister Morn shows the first sparks of brilliance that would evolve in later works such as Pale Fire. But . . . Morn also shows that instead of just hiding historical material, Nabokov utterly transforms it through the prism of theater.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“A whimsical, largely allegorical tragicomedy. . . . As in much of Nabokov, love is both necessary and impossible, a delicious and inescapable torture. . . . Nabokov explores more fully and explicitly than he ever would again what he saw as the origins of the revolutionary impulse in a death-instinct and passion for destruction.” —The New Republic

“Contains swerving turns of phrase and ringing contrasts that hint at the glorious writing of the mature Nabokov. . . . The story of revolt for revolt’s sake is powerful, and the play’s strength is how it dramatizes this excruciating truth.” —Booklist

“A kind of primer to Nabokov’s later work, an index of the motifs and preoccupations that will surface again and again: the elusiveness of happiness, the beauty of the world, the stubborn fact of death, the transformative possibilities of art, and the blurring of reality and make-believe. . . . Loss and death are the two electrical currents that run beneath his polished, magical prose, and those themes–as well as the subject of revolution and its consequences–are the animating forces behind his first major work.” —The New York Times

“The dynamism of the play’s romantic relationships makes it a firmly modernist work. . . . An intriguing riff on Elizabethan drama.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A gem. The imagery is stunning, metaphor opening out of metaphor. . . . It is visionary and musical. . . . In theme and texture it gives little sense of being early work. With a text whose lexicon seems to contain so many of the novels to come, from Bend Sinister to Laughter in the Dark and Transparent Things, it puts us in the head of eternal Nabokov.” —Times Literary Supplement (London)
Excerpted from the Hardcover Edition



Introduction

The Tragedy of Mister Morn was Vladimir Nabokov’s first major work, and the laboratory in which he discovered and tested many of the themes he would subsequently develop in the next fifty-odd years: the elusiveness of happiness; the creative and destructive playfulness of the imagination; courage, cowardice, and loyalty; the truth of masks; the struggle of freedom and order for possession of the soul; the sovereignty of desire and illicit passion; and what one character calls ‘that likeness which exists / between truth and high fantasy’ (I.ii.59–60), a likeness under whose inspiration Nabokov would take reality, fancy, art, and impossibility, and twist them together into the four-dimensional knots of Lolita, Pale Fire, and his other great novels.

Yet Morn, which Nabokov wrote in Prague in the winter of 1923 to 1924, when he was only twenty-four years old, was never performed or published in his lifetime, though several readings of the play did take place in Berlin, then Nabokov’s home, in the spring of 1923. The opportunities in Berlin for staging a Russian play by a nearly unknown writer were limited, and publication cannot have seemed financially attractive to the émigré publishing houses that would later print Nabokov’s novels. In America, and then in Switzerland, Nabokov translated most of his Russian fiction, but not his early plays, and when he died, in 1977, the typescript and fair copy of Morn still lay dormant in his ­personal archive in Montreux. Then, in 1997, Zvezda, a Russian literary journal, published the complete Russian text of Morn; and in 2008 the play finally became available to a wider (Russian-reading) audience when a revised version of the text was published in book form by Azbuka Press of St Petersburg. These publications have in turn made possible this current edition – the first translation of Morn into English.

While Morn is in many respects the seedbed for Nabokov’s major novels, there are also elements in it which are fascinatingly unlike anything in his later work, and which reflect issues in Nabokov’s life at the time of writing. Most prominent of these is revolution. Nabokov came from a distinguished liberal family in St Petersburg: his father, V. D. Nabokov, had been one of the ministers in the short-lived Kerensky government which ruled between the fall of the Tsar and the ascent to power of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917. That year, the Nabokov family fled St Petersburg, first for Yalta, then for London, and, eventually, Berlin – where the young Nabokov would rejoin them in 1922, after completing his degree at Cambridge. Even in Berlin, however, the Nabokov family was not safe from the extremist ideologies of right and left which had vied for power in Russia after the failure of the liberal centre, and on 28 March 1922 Nabokov’s father was shot dead by a Monarchist assassin who was in fact aiming not at him but at another émigré politician.

Nabokov’s hatred of the Soviet regime is directly expressed in much of his writing, most prominently his novels Invitation to a Beheading (1935/6) and Bend Sinister (1947). But he would never again write anywhere nearly so directly about the moment of revolution itself, or so probingly about ideology, as he did in Morn. In the play’s two main revolutionaries, Tremens and Klian, Nabokov depicts a politics and poetics of nihilism which, it is implied, was the driving force behind the Russian Revolution. In this Nabokov was refining a critique of revolutionary ideology which can be traced back as far as Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) and Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1872). He would articulate this critique again in his last, and greatest, Russian novel, The Gift (1937/8), whose fourth chapter is a mocking biography of Nikolai Chernyshevsky – the revolutionary thinker of the 1860s who was the object of Turgenev’s and Dostoevsky’s conservative critiques, and would become Lenin’s hero. But in Morn Nabokov explores more fully and explicitly than he ever would again what he saw as the origins of the revolutionary impulse in a death-instinct and passion for destruction. When Ganus, who had once been a revolutionary, returns from exile and discovers the happiness that the masked King has brought to the kingdom, he asks Tremens why he is not now satisfied. Tremens pours scorn on him. Neither happiness nor equality is Tremens’s purpose, he explains; rather, he is seeking to imitate the violent destructiveness of life itself, which ‘rushes headlong / into ash, [and] destroys everything in its way’ (I.i.287–8). ‘Everything,’ Tremens explains, ‘is destruction. And / the faster it is, the sweeter, the sweeter . . .’ (I.i.295–6). To him, this destruction is beauty:

Did you see,

one windy night, by moonlight, the shadows

of ruins? That is the ultimate beauty –

and towards it I lead the world.

(I.i.267–70)

Tremens cites as one aspect of that destructiveness the sexual drive itself, in the figure of ‘the maiden, who prays for the blow of a man’s love’ (I.i.294), and one distinctive quality of the play is an unblushing erotic candour to which Nabokov would not fully return until Lolita (1955). Thus Klian, the violent-minded revolutionary poet who serves as Tremens’s factotum, tells his fiancée Ella that

 . . . To enter you, oh, to enter,

would be like entering a tight and searing

sheath, to gaze into your blood, to break

through your bones, to learn, to grasp, to touch,

to press your being in between my palms! . . .

 (I.ii.122–6)

This anticipates Humbert Humbert in Chapter 2, Part Two of Lolita saying that ‘my only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.’ Yet, as with so many aspects of the play, in the sphere of desire Nabokov explores opposite poles of experience. Against Klian’s dark vision of sexual appetite is set a more salubrious expression of love’s idealizing power – in the faith that Midia, and the other citizens, place in Morn’s nearly magical beneficence, and in Ella’s idea of love as a force that coalesces experience:

 . . . all is one: my love and the raw sun,

your pale face and the bright trickling icicles

beneath the roof, the amber spot upon

the porous sugary snow mound, the raw sun

and my love, my love . . .

 (III.ii.190–94)

This, and the tenderly specific attention paid to the minutiae of Ella’s hair, clothes, and make-up, seem to attest to the fact that Nabokov wrote Morn soon after meeting and falling in love with Véra Slonim, who would become his wife – and the play’s typist. With her girlishness, humour, and idealism, Ella ranks alongside Lolita as one of Nabokov’s few fully realized female characters.

If, in its treatment of revolutionary ideology, death, and desire, Morn shows us elements that Nabokov would not develop again, or not for a long time, there is one respect in which it stands very obviously as the source of Nabokov’s immediately subsequent writing, and this is in its exploration of the twin themes of happiness and make-believe. In 1924, Nabokov would begin writing his first novel, Happiness. The novel was aborted and its drafts are now lost, but there is no question that its title expresses one of the central themes of Nabokov’s oeuvre, in which happiness is a mysterious variable, ‘the zany of its own mortality’, as Sebastian Knight calls it, no sooner found than lost, but always something much more profound than anything ‘happiness’ means in modern use, where it merely names the mirage evoked by the goals we set ourselves. As for make-believe, it is central to Nabokov’s work that any reality worth caring about is one freshly imagined, that, as he puts it in Strong Opinions (1973), ‘average reality begins to rot and stink as soon as the act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture’, and therefore that, as Vadim’s aunt tells him in Chapter 2 of Nabokov’s final complete novel, Look at the Harlequins! (1974), it is a fundamental imperative for every person that in art and life he should ‘Play! Invent the world! Create it!’ The theme of make-believe also links Morn to two other verse-plays which Nabokov had written in 1923 before embarking on Morn, the one-act closet dramas Death and The Pole, which together mark out the two poles between which Morn moves: in the first, a cynical intellectual related in mentality to Tremens presses the view of illusion as arrant deceit; while the second heroizes Captain Scott, the quixotic Antarctic explorer, a Morn-like figure whose steadfast courage inspires and sustains his followers, who always seems to be playing, even in the face of death, and who is, like Morn, recognized by his laughter.

In Morn Nabokov gave these themes a political significance more explicit than any we find in his later work. Against the revolutionary politics, grounded in the ideals of equality, sameness, and even death, that Tremens and Klian embody, Nabokov postulates a conservative politics, animated by an ideal of happiness. As Morn says, he

. . . created

an age of happiness, an age of harmony . . . God,

give me strength . . . Playfully, lightly I ruled;

I appeared in a black mask in the ringing hall,

before my cold, decrepit senators . . . masterfully

I revived them – and left again, laughing . . .

 (III.i.131–6)

Morn’s example has aestheticized the world, restoring order by turning it into a fairy tale or a play: if even the King is an actor, then all identity is not something sovereign but something performed, and he shows people how to act as they would wish to be. He is a fantasy of the Foreigner, a mysterious figure who enters at the beginning and the end of the play and comes from the real world of revolutionary Russia:

. . . In our country all is not well,

not well . . . When I wake up, I will tell them

what a magnificent king I dreamt of . . .

 (V.ii.98–100)

The implicit argument of Morn is that for the sake of order, ­morality, and happiness in the real world, people must make-believe in the possibility of an ideal world. The play takes place in an imaginary kingdom repeatedly described as having the air of a skazka or fairy tale. In a synopsis of the play, Nabokov described this atmosphere as ‘neoromanticism’, saying that the setting of the play took ‘something from the 18th Century Venice of Casanova and from the 30s [the 1830s] of the Petersburg epoch’. It also borrows from Shakespeare, for in Morn, as in Shakespeare’s history plays such as Richard III, the state is, necessarily, a play or pageant; a secret passage leads from the throne-room to the theatre. This is one of the many details that Nabokov would reuse nearly forty years later in his most metafictive work, Pale Fire (1962), in which an imaginary poet and imaginary king conjure with each other’s existences. Kinbote, the imaginary King of Zembla, or semblance, may have assassinated Shade, the imaginary poet, just as in Morn Tremens says: ‘it’s a shame, Dandilio, that the imaginary / thief did not destroy the made-up king!’ (V.i.188–9). But in Morn, as later in Pale Fire, this kingdom of imagination is all too precarious: Tremens is determined to unmask Morn’s happy reign of make-believe as a cynical fraud, and to tear down the civic order it supports. He succeeds in doing so, until a false rumour that Morn fled for love, not cowardice, reignites the romanticism of the people. It is to defend that illusion that Morn, ultimately, must kill himself.

This idea of kingship as theatre, or as a work of imagination, is one of the many respects in which Morn is indebted to Shakespeare. The heavy crown is a symbol of the burdensomeness of power, as it is in Shakespeare’s history plays, such as Henry IV, Part 2, towards the end of which Prince Henry stares uneasily at the crown lying on his dying father’s pillow, ‘so troublesome a bedfellow’, which, he says, ‘dost pinch thy bearer’, and ‘dost sit / Like a rich armour worn in heat of day, / That scalds with safety’ (IV.v.22, 29–31). In Morn, too, the ‘fiery crown’ burns and squeezes with ‘its diamond pain’, and Morn complains that

. . . The stupefied mob

does not know that the knight’s body is dark

and sweaty, locked in its fairy tale armour . . .

 (V.ii.124–6)

From Shakespeare, too, Nabokov drew a series of metaphors for civic order which could be deployed to warn against the rash alterations of Bolshevism. The kingdom is like the human body, so that Tremens’s fever symbolizes the convulsions he wishes upon the state, as, again, in Henry IV, Part 2, where the Archbishop of York declares that

. . . we are all diseased,

And with our surfeiting and wanton hours

Have brought ourselves into a burning fever,

And we must bleed for it.

 (IV.i.54–7)

Or the kingdom is like music, as Ganus argues when he says that ‘The power of the King / is living and harmonious, it moves me now / like music’ (I.i.231–3), echoing an idea most famously expressed in a speech given by Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. The same idea is implicit in The Tempest, a play with which Morn is associated through the kinship between Prospero and Morn, both of them magician-kings. But the Shakespeare play most obviously linked to Morn is Othello: Ella dresses Ganus up as Othello so that he can visit Midia unobserved, and she twice quotes the lines Desdemona utters when Othello is about to smother her (the first time slightly misquoting them). The Tragedy of Mister Morn is less concerned with doubling, and with the duality of human nature, than Nabokov’s later works. But here already, it is clear that when Ganus wears Othello’s face, he discovers in himself a shadow side, a dark jealousy like that which blackened and distorted Othello. Conversely, Morn, by wearing a mask, becomes a nameless sovereign, King X, as Nabokov calls him in the synopsis, the variable upon which a lucky people can project their fantasies of happiness and order; and when he is unmasked by his cowardice, he betrays not only the ideals of his people and his own self-respect but even the identity and integrity he had once seen when he gazed into the healing silver of the mirror.

But in Morn Nabokov was trying to emulate Shakespeare not only at the level of image and symbol, but also of character and drama, register and rhythm. The simplest expression of this is that Morn is written in the iambic pentameter of Shakespearean tragedy, though Nabokov is more strictly regular in his rhythmic patterns than Shakespeare. Though Morn’s prosody alludes to Shakespeare, it does so through the mediation of Pushkin’s ‘little tragedies’ (all written in 1830, the most famous of which is Mozart and Salieri). More specifically Shakespearean – and ­un-Pushkinian – is the language of Morn, which, especially in the philosophic speeches of Tremens, Klian, Morn and Dandilio, is densely metaphorical and highly compressed in the manner of late Shakespeare. So Morn, saying farewell to Midia, justifies the aberrations of fate by comparing life to music, before suddenly shifting the already difficult metaphor into another key, comparing the music of existence to the structure of a building whose details can detract from an appreciation of its overall harmony:

But, you see – the moulded whimsy of a frieze

on a portico keeps us from recognizing,

sometimes, the symmetry of the whole . . .

 (IV.235–7)
Copyright © 2013 by Vladimir Nabokov Translated by Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Vladimir Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940, he left France for America, where he wrote some of his greatest works—Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962)—and translated his earlier Russian novels into English. He taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977. View titles by Vladimir Nabokov

About

Vladimir Nabokov’s earliest major work, written when he was twenty-four, is a full-length play in verse of Shakespearean beauty and richness.

The story of an incognito king whose love for the wife of a banished revolutionary brings on the chaos the king has fought to prevent, this five-act play was never published in Nabokov’s lifetime and lay in manuscript until it appeared in a Russian literary journal in 1997. It is an astonishingly precocious work, in exquisite verse, touching for the first time on what would become this great writer’s major themes: intense sexual desire and jealousy, the elusiveness of happiness, the power of the imagination, and the eternal battle between truth and fantasy. The Tragedy of Mister Morn is Nabokov’s major response to the Russian Revolution, which he had lived through, but it approaches the events of 1917 through the prism of Shakespearean tragedy.
 
Translated by Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan

“A road map to what this dazzling sorcerer of words would later create.” —The New York Times
 
“Its speeches are bright with Nabokovian gems. . . . Mister Morn [is] enticingly predictive of Nabokov’s great work. The flutter of magic, the avuncular twinkle, the B-movie danger–it’s all here.” —The New Yorker

“If the unfinished novel The Original of Laura revealed to the world the last embers of Nabokov’s genius, The Tragedy of Mister Morn shows the first sparks of brilliance that would evolve in later works such as Pale Fire. But . . . Morn also shows that instead of just hiding historical material, Nabokov utterly transforms it through the prism of theater.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“A whimsical, largely allegorical tragicomedy. . . . As in much of Nabokov, love is both necessary and impossible, a delicious and inescapable torture. . . . Nabokov explores more fully and explicitly than he ever would again what he saw as the origins of the revolutionary impulse in a death-instinct and passion for destruction.” —The New Republic

“Contains swerving turns of phrase and ringing contrasts that hint at the glorious writing of the mature Nabokov. . . . The story of revolt for revolt’s sake is powerful, and the play’s strength is how it dramatizes this excruciating truth.” —Booklist

“A kind of primer to Nabokov’s later work, an index of the motifs and preoccupations that will surface again and again: the elusiveness of happiness, the beauty of the world, the stubborn fact of death, the transformative possibilities of art, and the blurring of reality and make-believe. . . . Loss and death are the two electrical currents that run beneath his polished, magical prose, and those themes–as well as the subject of revolution and its consequences–are the animating forces behind his first major work.” —The New York Times

“The dynamism of the play’s romantic relationships makes it a firmly modernist work. . . . An intriguing riff on Elizabethan drama.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A gem. The imagery is stunning, metaphor opening out of metaphor. . . . It is visionary and musical. . . . In theme and texture it gives little sense of being early work. With a text whose lexicon seems to contain so many of the novels to come, from Bend Sinister to Laughter in the Dark and Transparent Things, it puts us in the head of eternal Nabokov.” —Times Literary Supplement (London)

Excerpt

Excerpted from the Hardcover Edition



Introduction

The Tragedy of Mister Morn was Vladimir Nabokov’s first major work, and the laboratory in which he discovered and tested many of the themes he would subsequently develop in the next fifty-odd years: the elusiveness of happiness; the creative and destructive playfulness of the imagination; courage, cowardice, and loyalty; the truth of masks; the struggle of freedom and order for possession of the soul; the sovereignty of desire and illicit passion; and what one character calls ‘that likeness which exists / between truth and high fantasy’ (I.ii.59–60), a likeness under whose inspiration Nabokov would take reality, fancy, art, and impossibility, and twist them together into the four-dimensional knots of Lolita, Pale Fire, and his other great novels.

Yet Morn, which Nabokov wrote in Prague in the winter of 1923 to 1924, when he was only twenty-four years old, was never performed or published in his lifetime, though several readings of the play did take place in Berlin, then Nabokov’s home, in the spring of 1923. The opportunities in Berlin for staging a Russian play by a nearly unknown writer were limited, and publication cannot have seemed financially attractive to the émigré publishing houses that would later print Nabokov’s novels. In America, and then in Switzerland, Nabokov translated most of his Russian fiction, but not his early plays, and when he died, in 1977, the typescript and fair copy of Morn still lay dormant in his ­personal archive in Montreux. Then, in 1997, Zvezda, a Russian literary journal, published the complete Russian text of Morn; and in 2008 the play finally became available to a wider (Russian-reading) audience when a revised version of the text was published in book form by Azbuka Press of St Petersburg. These publications have in turn made possible this current edition – the first translation of Morn into English.

While Morn is in many respects the seedbed for Nabokov’s major novels, there are also elements in it which are fascinatingly unlike anything in his later work, and which reflect issues in Nabokov’s life at the time of writing. Most prominent of these is revolution. Nabokov came from a distinguished liberal family in St Petersburg: his father, V. D. Nabokov, had been one of the ministers in the short-lived Kerensky government which ruled between the fall of the Tsar and the ascent to power of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917. That year, the Nabokov family fled St Petersburg, first for Yalta, then for London, and, eventually, Berlin – where the young Nabokov would rejoin them in 1922, after completing his degree at Cambridge. Even in Berlin, however, the Nabokov family was not safe from the extremist ideologies of right and left which had vied for power in Russia after the failure of the liberal centre, and on 28 March 1922 Nabokov’s father was shot dead by a Monarchist assassin who was in fact aiming not at him but at another émigré politician.

Nabokov’s hatred of the Soviet regime is directly expressed in much of his writing, most prominently his novels Invitation to a Beheading (1935/6) and Bend Sinister (1947). But he would never again write anywhere nearly so directly about the moment of revolution itself, or so probingly about ideology, as he did in Morn. In the play’s two main revolutionaries, Tremens and Klian, Nabokov depicts a politics and poetics of nihilism which, it is implied, was the driving force behind the Russian Revolution. In this Nabokov was refining a critique of revolutionary ideology which can be traced back as far as Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) and Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1872). He would articulate this critique again in his last, and greatest, Russian novel, The Gift (1937/8), whose fourth chapter is a mocking biography of Nikolai Chernyshevsky – the revolutionary thinker of the 1860s who was the object of Turgenev’s and Dostoevsky’s conservative critiques, and would become Lenin’s hero. But in Morn Nabokov explores more fully and explicitly than he ever would again what he saw as the origins of the revolutionary impulse in a death-instinct and passion for destruction. When Ganus, who had once been a revolutionary, returns from exile and discovers the happiness that the masked King has brought to the kingdom, he asks Tremens why he is not now satisfied. Tremens pours scorn on him. Neither happiness nor equality is Tremens’s purpose, he explains; rather, he is seeking to imitate the violent destructiveness of life itself, which ‘rushes headlong / into ash, [and] destroys everything in its way’ (I.i.287–8). ‘Everything,’ Tremens explains, ‘is destruction. And / the faster it is, the sweeter, the sweeter . . .’ (I.i.295–6). To him, this destruction is beauty:

Did you see,

one windy night, by moonlight, the shadows

of ruins? That is the ultimate beauty –

and towards it I lead the world.

(I.i.267–70)

Tremens cites as one aspect of that destructiveness the sexual drive itself, in the figure of ‘the maiden, who prays for the blow of a man’s love’ (I.i.294), and one distinctive quality of the play is an unblushing erotic candour to which Nabokov would not fully return until Lolita (1955). Thus Klian, the violent-minded revolutionary poet who serves as Tremens’s factotum, tells his fiancée Ella that

 . . . To enter you, oh, to enter,

would be like entering a tight and searing

sheath, to gaze into your blood, to break

through your bones, to learn, to grasp, to touch,

to press your being in between my palms! . . .

 (I.ii.122–6)

This anticipates Humbert Humbert in Chapter 2, Part Two of Lolita saying that ‘my only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.’ Yet, as with so many aspects of the play, in the sphere of desire Nabokov explores opposite poles of experience. Against Klian’s dark vision of sexual appetite is set a more salubrious expression of love’s idealizing power – in the faith that Midia, and the other citizens, place in Morn’s nearly magical beneficence, and in Ella’s idea of love as a force that coalesces experience:

 . . . all is one: my love and the raw sun,

your pale face and the bright trickling icicles

beneath the roof, the amber spot upon

the porous sugary snow mound, the raw sun

and my love, my love . . .

 (III.ii.190–94)

This, and the tenderly specific attention paid to the minutiae of Ella’s hair, clothes, and make-up, seem to attest to the fact that Nabokov wrote Morn soon after meeting and falling in love with Véra Slonim, who would become his wife – and the play’s typist. With her girlishness, humour, and idealism, Ella ranks alongside Lolita as one of Nabokov’s few fully realized female characters.

If, in its treatment of revolutionary ideology, death, and desire, Morn shows us elements that Nabokov would not develop again, or not for a long time, there is one respect in which it stands very obviously as the source of Nabokov’s immediately subsequent writing, and this is in its exploration of the twin themes of happiness and make-believe. In 1924, Nabokov would begin writing his first novel, Happiness. The novel was aborted and its drafts are now lost, but there is no question that its title expresses one of the central themes of Nabokov’s oeuvre, in which happiness is a mysterious variable, ‘the zany of its own mortality’, as Sebastian Knight calls it, no sooner found than lost, but always something much more profound than anything ‘happiness’ means in modern use, where it merely names the mirage evoked by the goals we set ourselves. As for make-believe, it is central to Nabokov’s work that any reality worth caring about is one freshly imagined, that, as he puts it in Strong Opinions (1973), ‘average reality begins to rot and stink as soon as the act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture’, and therefore that, as Vadim’s aunt tells him in Chapter 2 of Nabokov’s final complete novel, Look at the Harlequins! (1974), it is a fundamental imperative for every person that in art and life he should ‘Play! Invent the world! Create it!’ The theme of make-believe also links Morn to two other verse-plays which Nabokov had written in 1923 before embarking on Morn, the one-act closet dramas Death and The Pole, which together mark out the two poles between which Morn moves: in the first, a cynical intellectual related in mentality to Tremens presses the view of illusion as arrant deceit; while the second heroizes Captain Scott, the quixotic Antarctic explorer, a Morn-like figure whose steadfast courage inspires and sustains his followers, who always seems to be playing, even in the face of death, and who is, like Morn, recognized by his laughter.

In Morn Nabokov gave these themes a political significance more explicit than any we find in his later work. Against the revolutionary politics, grounded in the ideals of equality, sameness, and even death, that Tremens and Klian embody, Nabokov postulates a conservative politics, animated by an ideal of happiness. As Morn says, he

. . . created

an age of happiness, an age of harmony . . . God,

give me strength . . . Playfully, lightly I ruled;

I appeared in a black mask in the ringing hall,

before my cold, decrepit senators . . . masterfully

I revived them – and left again, laughing . . .

 (III.i.131–6)

Morn’s example has aestheticized the world, restoring order by turning it into a fairy tale or a play: if even the King is an actor, then all identity is not something sovereign but something performed, and he shows people how to act as they would wish to be. He is a fantasy of the Foreigner, a mysterious figure who enters at the beginning and the end of the play and comes from the real world of revolutionary Russia:

. . . In our country all is not well,

not well . . . When I wake up, I will tell them

what a magnificent king I dreamt of . . .

 (V.ii.98–100)

The implicit argument of Morn is that for the sake of order, ­morality, and happiness in the real world, people must make-believe in the possibility of an ideal world. The play takes place in an imaginary kingdom repeatedly described as having the air of a skazka or fairy tale. In a synopsis of the play, Nabokov described this atmosphere as ‘neoromanticism’, saying that the setting of the play took ‘something from the 18th Century Venice of Casanova and from the 30s [the 1830s] of the Petersburg epoch’. It also borrows from Shakespeare, for in Morn, as in Shakespeare’s history plays such as Richard III, the state is, necessarily, a play or pageant; a secret passage leads from the throne-room to the theatre. This is one of the many details that Nabokov would reuse nearly forty years later in his most metafictive work, Pale Fire (1962), in which an imaginary poet and imaginary king conjure with each other’s existences. Kinbote, the imaginary King of Zembla, or semblance, may have assassinated Shade, the imaginary poet, just as in Morn Tremens says: ‘it’s a shame, Dandilio, that the imaginary / thief did not destroy the made-up king!’ (V.i.188–9). But in Morn, as later in Pale Fire, this kingdom of imagination is all too precarious: Tremens is determined to unmask Morn’s happy reign of make-believe as a cynical fraud, and to tear down the civic order it supports. He succeeds in doing so, until a false rumour that Morn fled for love, not cowardice, reignites the romanticism of the people. It is to defend that illusion that Morn, ultimately, must kill himself.

This idea of kingship as theatre, or as a work of imagination, is one of the many respects in which Morn is indebted to Shakespeare. The heavy crown is a symbol of the burdensomeness of power, as it is in Shakespeare’s history plays, such as Henry IV, Part 2, towards the end of which Prince Henry stares uneasily at the crown lying on his dying father’s pillow, ‘so troublesome a bedfellow’, which, he says, ‘dost pinch thy bearer’, and ‘dost sit / Like a rich armour worn in heat of day, / That scalds with safety’ (IV.v.22, 29–31). In Morn, too, the ‘fiery crown’ burns and squeezes with ‘its diamond pain’, and Morn complains that

. . . The stupefied mob

does not know that the knight’s body is dark

and sweaty, locked in its fairy tale armour . . .

 (V.ii.124–6)

From Shakespeare, too, Nabokov drew a series of metaphors for civic order which could be deployed to warn against the rash alterations of Bolshevism. The kingdom is like the human body, so that Tremens’s fever symbolizes the convulsions he wishes upon the state, as, again, in Henry IV, Part 2, where the Archbishop of York declares that

. . . we are all diseased,

And with our surfeiting and wanton hours

Have brought ourselves into a burning fever,

And we must bleed for it.

 (IV.i.54–7)

Or the kingdom is like music, as Ganus argues when he says that ‘The power of the King / is living and harmonious, it moves me now / like music’ (I.i.231–3), echoing an idea most famously expressed in a speech given by Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. The same idea is implicit in The Tempest, a play with which Morn is associated through the kinship between Prospero and Morn, both of them magician-kings. But the Shakespeare play most obviously linked to Morn is Othello: Ella dresses Ganus up as Othello so that he can visit Midia unobserved, and she twice quotes the lines Desdemona utters when Othello is about to smother her (the first time slightly misquoting them). The Tragedy of Mister Morn is less concerned with doubling, and with the duality of human nature, than Nabokov’s later works. But here already, it is clear that when Ganus wears Othello’s face, he discovers in himself a shadow side, a dark jealousy like that which blackened and distorted Othello. Conversely, Morn, by wearing a mask, becomes a nameless sovereign, King X, as Nabokov calls him in the synopsis, the variable upon which a lucky people can project their fantasies of happiness and order; and when he is unmasked by his cowardice, he betrays not only the ideals of his people and his own self-respect but even the identity and integrity he had once seen when he gazed into the healing silver of the mirror.

But in Morn Nabokov was trying to emulate Shakespeare not only at the level of image and symbol, but also of character and drama, register and rhythm. The simplest expression of this is that Morn is written in the iambic pentameter of Shakespearean tragedy, though Nabokov is more strictly regular in his rhythmic patterns than Shakespeare. Though Morn’s prosody alludes to Shakespeare, it does so through the mediation of Pushkin’s ‘little tragedies’ (all written in 1830, the most famous of which is Mozart and Salieri). More specifically Shakespearean – and ­un-Pushkinian – is the language of Morn, which, especially in the philosophic speeches of Tremens, Klian, Morn and Dandilio, is densely metaphorical and highly compressed in the manner of late Shakespeare. So Morn, saying farewell to Midia, justifies the aberrations of fate by comparing life to music, before suddenly shifting the already difficult metaphor into another key, comparing the music of existence to the structure of a building whose details can detract from an appreciation of its overall harmony:

But, you see – the moulded whimsy of a frieze

on a portico keeps us from recognizing,

sometimes, the symmetry of the whole . . .

 (IV.235–7)
Copyright © 2013 by Vladimir Nabokov Translated by Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

Vladimir Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940, he left France for America, where he wrote some of his greatest works—Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962)—and translated his earlier Russian novels into English. He taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977. View titles by Vladimir Nabokov

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    978-0-8041-7060-4
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 25, 2014
  • Paradise
    Paradise
    Toni Morrison
    978-0-8041-6988-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 11, 2014
  • The Blind Man's Garden
    The Blind Man's Garden
    Nadeem Aslam
    978-0-345-80285-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 28, 2014
  • All That Is
    All That Is
    A Novel
    James Salter
    978-1-4000-7842-4
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 28, 2014
  • Middle C
    Middle C
    William H. Gass
    978-0-8041-6878-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 03, 2013
  • Inheritance
    Inheritance
    Indira Ganesan
    978-0-8041-6924-0
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 05, 2013
  • The Counselor (Movie Tie-in Edition)
    The Counselor (Movie Tie-in Edition)
    A Screenplay
    Cormac McCarthy
    978-0-345-80359-7
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 15, 2013
  • More Than I Love My Life
    More Than I Love My Life
    A novel
    David Grossman
    978-0-593-31259-9
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 12, 2022
  • The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
    The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
    A novel
    Richard Flanagan
    978-0-593-31370-1
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • Trio
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    A novel
    William Boyd
    978-0-593-31146-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • Klara and the Sun
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    A novel
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    978-0-593-31129-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • Antiquities and Other Stories
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    Cynthia Ozick
    978-0-593-31276-6
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • Inside Story
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    A novel
    Martin Amis
    978-0-593-31171-4
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • Let Me Tell You What I Mean
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    Joan Didion
    978-0-593-31219-3
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • Medusa's Ankles
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    Selected Stories
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    978-0-593-32158-4
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Knopf
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  • Palimpsest
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    A Memoir
    Gore Vidal
    978-0-593-31439-5
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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    Wole Soyinka
    978-0-593-46719-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • The Interpreters
    The Interpreters
    Wole Soyinka
    978-0-593-46721-3
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
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  • Here We Are
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    A novel
    Graham Swift
    978-1-9848-9952-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 10, 2021
  • Juneteenth (Revised)
    Juneteenth (Revised)
    Ralph Ellison
    978-0-593-31461-6
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 18, 2021
  • Think, Write, Speak
    Think, Write, Speak
    Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor
    Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov Literary Trust
    978-1-101-87370-0
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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    John Cheever
    978-0-593-08177-8
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
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    978-0-593-31289-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
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  • Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)
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    Gabriel García Márquez
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    $25.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • The Scandal of the Century
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    And Other Writings
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    $16.95 US
    Paperback
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    $16.00 US
    Paperback
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    $17.00 US
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  • The Source of Self-Regard
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    Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
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    Paperback
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  • Love Is Blind
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    A novel
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    $16.95 US
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  • So Much Life Left Over
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  • Myra Breckinridge
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    978-0-525-56650-2
    $18.00 US
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    May 21, 2019
  • Warlight
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    978-0-525-56296-2
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
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    Apr 02, 2019
  • First Person
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    Richard Flanagan
    978-0-525-43577-8
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
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  • The Only Story
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    A novel
    Julian Barnes
    978-0-525-56306-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
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  • A Long Way from Home
    A Long Way from Home
    Peter Carey
    978-0-525-43599-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 05, 2019
  • The Rub of Time
    The Rub of Time
    Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017
    Martin Amis
    978-1-4000-9599-5
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 22, 2019
  • I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
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    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-1-101-91118-1
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 08, 2019
  • The Frolic of the Beasts
    The Frolic of the Beasts
    Yukio Mishima
    978-0-525-43415-3
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • The Myth of Sisyphus
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    Albert Camus
    978-0-525-56445-4
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 06, 2018
  • Dinner at the Center of the Earth
    Dinner at the Center of the Earth
    Nathan Englander
    978-0-525-43404-7
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2018
  • Between Eternities
    Between Eternities
    And Other Writings
    Javier Marías
    978-1-101-97211-3
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 28, 2018
  • A Boy in Winter
    A Boy in Winter
    A Novel
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    978-0-8041-6880-9
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    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • The Red-Haired Woman
    The Red-Haired Woman
    Orhan Pamuk
    978-1-101-97423-0
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    Paperback
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    Jul 10, 2018
  • Men Without Women
    Men Without Women
    Stories
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    978-1-101-97452-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 01, 2018
  • The Golden Legend
    The Golden Legend
    A novel
    Nadeem Aslam
    978-1-101-97338-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 24, 2018
  • The Woman on the Stairs
    The Woman on the Stairs
    A Novel
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    978-1-101-91234-8
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    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • A Horse Walks Into a Bar
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    A novel
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    978-1-101-97349-3
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    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • South and West
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    From a Notebook
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    978-0-525-43419-1
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    Paperback
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  • Letters to Véra
    Letters to Véra
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-307-47658-6
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    Paperback
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  • House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
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    Yasunari Kawabata
    978-0-525-43414-6
    $9.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
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  • The Boat Rocker
    The Boat Rocker
    A Novel
    Ha Jin
    978-0-8041-7037-6
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
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    Oct 17, 2017
  • Absolutely on Music
    Absolutely on Music
    Conversations
    Haruki Murakami, Seiji Ozawa
    978-0-8041-7372-8
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • The Spy
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    A Novel of Mata Hari
    Paulo Coelho
    978-0-525-43279-1
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
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  • Keeping an Eye Open
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    Essays on Art
    Julian Barnes
    978-1-101-87337-3
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
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  • The Noise of Time
    The Noise of Time
    A Novel
    Julian Barnes
    978-1-101-97118-5
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
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  • I Am Not Your Negro
    I Am Not Your Negro
    A Companion Edition to the Documentary Film Directed by Raoul Peck
    James Baldwin, Raoul Peck
    978-0-525-43469-6
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    Paperback
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  • A Decent Ride
    A Decent Ride
    Irvine Welsh
    978-1-101-97084-3
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    Paperback
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  • Mothering Sunday
    Mothering Sunday
    A Romance
    Graham Swift
    978-1-101-97172-7
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
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    Jan 10, 2017
  • Julieta (Movie Tie-in Edition)
    Julieta (Movie Tie-in Edition)
    Three Stories That Inspired the Movie
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    978-0-525-43426-9
    $9.99 US
    Ebook
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  • Notwithstanding
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    Louis de Bernieres
    978-1-101-96987-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
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  • A Strangeness in My Mind
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    A novel
    Orhan Pamuk
    978-0-307-74484-5
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    Paperback
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  • The Blue Guitar
    The Blue Guitar
    John Banville
    978-0-8041-7361-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • The Dust That Falls from Dreams
    The Dust That Falls from Dreams
    A Novel
    Louis de Bernieres
    978-1-101-97000-3
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 26, 2016
  • Wind/Pinball
    Wind/Pinball
    Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (Two Novels)
    Haruki Murakami
    978-0-8041-7014-7
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    Paperback
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  • England and Other Stories
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    Graham Swift
    978-1-101-87238-3
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    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 19, 2016
  • Odysseus Abroad
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    A novel
    Amit Chaudhuri
    978-1-101-97145-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • God Help the Child
    God Help the Child
    Toni Morrison
    978-0-307-74092-2
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 26, 2016
  • The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins
    The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins
    Irvine Welsh
    978-0-8041-7321-6
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 12, 2016
  • The Buried Giant
    The Buried Giant
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    978-0-307-45579-6
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 05, 2016
  • Amnesia
    Amnesia
    Peter Carey
    978-0-8041-7132-8
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 08, 2015
  • Family Furnishings
    Family Furnishings
    Selected Stories, 1995-2014
    Alice Munro
    978-1-101-87235-2
    $18.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 15, 2015
  • A Wilderness Station
    A Wilderness Station
    Selected Stories, 1968-1994
    Alice Munro
    978-1-101-97036-2
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 15, 2015
  • The Prophet
    The Prophet
    Kahlil Gibran
    978-1-101-97078-2
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 21, 2015
  • A Map of Betrayal
    A Map of Betrayal
    A Novel
    Ha Jin
    978-0-8041-7036-9
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 07, 2015
  • The Zone of Interest
    The Zone of Interest
    Martin Amis
    978-0-8041-7289-9
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 07, 2015
  • The Walk Home
    The Walk Home
    A Novel
    Rachel Seiffert
    978-1-101-87343-4
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 23, 2015
  • Adultery
    Adultery
    Paulo Coelho
    978-1-101-87224-6
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 26, 2015
  • Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
    Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
    Haruki Murakami
    978-0-8041-7012-3
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 05, 2015
  • The Narrow Road to the Deep North
    The Narrow Road to the Deep North
    Richard Flanagan
    978-0-8041-7147-2
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 14, 2015
  • The Fires of Autumn
    The Fires of Autumn
    Irene Nemirovsky
    978-1-101-87227-7
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 17, 2015
  • The News: A User's Manual
    The News: A User's Manual
    Alain De Botton
    978-0-307-47683-8
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 02, 2014
  • Falling Out of Time
    Falling Out of Time
    David Grossman
    978-0-345-80585-0
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 02, 2014
  • The Man of Feeling
    The Man of Feeling
    Javier Marías
    978-0-8041-7259-2
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 07, 2014
  • Levels of Life
    Levels of Life
    Julian Barnes
    978-0-345-80658-1
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 01, 2014
  • Beer in the Snooker Club
    Beer in the Snooker Club
    Waguih Ghali
    978-0-8041-7074-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 10, 2014
  • Subtle Bodies
    Subtle Bodies
    Norman Rush
    978-1-4000-7713-7
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 03, 2014
  • Going Home Again
    Going Home Again
    Dennis Bock
    978-1-4000-9610-7
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 06, 2014
  • The Infatuations
    The Infatuations
    Javier Marías
    978-0-307-95073-4
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 22, 2014
  • Vintage Munro
    Vintage Munro
    Nobel Prize Edition
    Alice Munro
    978-0-8041-7356-8
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 22, 2014
  • Bombay Stories
    Bombay Stories
    Saadat Hasan Manto
    978-0-8041-7060-4
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 25, 2014
  • Paradise
    Paradise
    Toni Morrison
    978-0-8041-6988-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 11, 2014
  • The Blind Man's Garden
    The Blind Man's Garden
    Nadeem Aslam
    978-0-345-80285-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 28, 2014
  • All That Is
    All That Is
    A Novel
    James Salter
    978-1-4000-7842-4
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 28, 2014
  • Middle C
    Middle C
    William H. Gass
    978-0-8041-6878-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 03, 2013
  • Inheritance
    Inheritance
    Indira Ganesan
    978-0-8041-6924-0
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 05, 2013
  • The Counselor (Movie Tie-in Edition)
    The Counselor (Movie Tie-in Edition)
    A Screenplay
    Cormac McCarthy
    978-0-345-80359-7
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 15, 2013

Other Books by this Author

  • The Original of Laura
    The Original of Laura
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-307-47285-4
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 08, 2013
  • Selected Poems of Vladimir Nabokov
    Selected Poems of Vladimir Nabokov
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-307-59335-1
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Knopf
    May 29, 2012
  • Vintage Nabokov
    Vintage Nabokov
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-1-4000-3401-7
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 06, 2004
  • Lolita: A Screenplay
    Lolita: A Screenplay
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-77255-2
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
    The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72997-6
    $21.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
    The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72726-2
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • Glory
    Glory
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72724-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 05, 1991
  • The Enchanter
    The Enchanter
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72886-3
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 20, 1991
  • The Gift
    The Gift
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72725-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 07, 1991
  • The Annotated Lolita
    The Annotated Lolita
    Revised and Updated
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72729-3
    $22.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 23, 1991
  • The Eye
    The Eye
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72723-1
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 05, 1990
  • The Luzhin Defense
    The Luzhin Defense
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72722-4
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • Look at the Harlequins!
    Look at the Harlequins!
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72728-6
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 16, 1990
  • Bend Sinister
    Bend Sinister
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72727-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 14, 1990
  • Strong Opinions
    Strong Opinions
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72609-8
    $17.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 17, 1990
  • Ada, or Ardor
    Ada, or Ardor
    A Family Chronicle
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72522-0
    $18.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 19, 1990
  • Laughter in the Dark
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    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72450-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 17, 1989
  • Mary
    Mary
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72620-3
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 20, 1989
  • Transparent Things
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    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72541-1
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 23, 1989
  • Invitation to a Beheading
    Invitation to a Beheading
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72531-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 19, 1989
  • Speak, Memory
    Speak, Memory
    An Autobiography Revisited
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72339-4
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
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  • King, Queen, Knave
    King, Queen, Knave
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72340-0
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 17, 1989
  • Pnin
    Pnin
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72341-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 18, 1989
  • Despair
    Despair
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72343-1
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 14, 1989
  • Pale Fire
    Pale Fire
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72342-4
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 23, 1989
  • Lolita
    Lolita
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72316-5
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 13, 1989
  • The Original of Laura
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    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-307-47285-4
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 08, 2013
  • Selected Poems of Vladimir Nabokov
    Selected Poems of Vladimir Nabokov
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-307-59335-1
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Knopf
    May 29, 2012
  • Vintage Nabokov
    Vintage Nabokov
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-1-4000-3401-7
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 06, 2004
  • Lolita: A Screenplay
    Lolita: A Screenplay
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-77255-2
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 26, 1997
  • The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
    The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72997-6
    $21.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 09, 1996
  • The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
    The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72726-2
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 04, 1992
  • Glory
    Glory
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72724-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 05, 1991
  • The Enchanter
    The Enchanter
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72886-3
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 20, 1991
  • The Gift
    The Gift
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72725-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 07, 1991
  • The Annotated Lolita
    The Annotated Lolita
    Revised and Updated
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72729-3
    $22.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 23, 1991
  • The Eye
    The Eye
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72723-1
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 05, 1990
  • The Luzhin Defense
    The Luzhin Defense
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72722-4
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 11, 1990
  • Look at the Harlequins!
    Look at the Harlequins!
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72728-6
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 16, 1990
  • Bend Sinister
    Bend Sinister
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72727-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 14, 1990
  • Strong Opinions
    Strong Opinions
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72609-8
    $17.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 17, 1990
  • Ada, or Ardor
    Ada, or Ardor
    A Family Chronicle
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72522-0
    $18.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 19, 1990
  • Laughter in the Dark
    Laughter in the Dark
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72450-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 17, 1989
  • Mary
    Mary
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72620-3
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 20, 1989
  • Transparent Things
    Transparent Things
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72541-1
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 23, 1989
  • Invitation to a Beheading
    Invitation to a Beheading
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72531-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 19, 1989
  • Speak, Memory
    Speak, Memory
    An Autobiography Revisited
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72339-4
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 28, 1989
  • King, Queen, Knave
    King, Queen, Knave
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72340-0
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 17, 1989
  • Pnin
    Pnin
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72341-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 18, 1989
  • Despair
    Despair
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72343-1
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 14, 1989
  • Pale Fire
    Pale Fire
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72342-4
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 23, 1989
  • Lolita
    Lolita
    Vladimir Nabokov
    978-0-679-72316-5
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 13, 1989
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