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Russia Between Art and Politics
Yale University Press
January 2008
On Sale: January 9, 2008
256 pages
ISBN: 0300108869
EAN: 9780300108866
Hardcover
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Fiction
Vladimir Nabokov’s “Western choice”—his exile to the West
after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—allowed him to take a
crucial literary journey, leaving the closed
nineteenth-century Russian culture behind and arriving in
the extreme openness of twentieth-century America. In
Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics,
Nina L. Khrushcheva offers the novel hypothesis that because
of this journey, the works of Russian-turned-American
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) are highly relevant to the
political transformation under way in Russia today.
Khrushcheva, a Russian living in America, finds in Nabokov’s
novels a useful guide for Russia’s integration into the
globalized world. Now one of Nabokov’s “Western” characters
herself, she discusses the cultural and social realities of
contemporary Russia that he foresaw a half-century earlier.
In Pale Fire; Ada, or Ardor; Pnin; and
other works, Nabokov reinterpreted the traditions of Russian
fiction, shifting emphasis from personal misery and communal
life to the notion of forging one’s own “happy” destiny. In
the twenty-first century Russia faces a similar challenge,
Khrushcheva contends, and Nabokov’s work reveals how skills
may be acquired to cope with the advent of democracy,
capitalism, and open borders.
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