King, Queen, Knave - Softcover

Vladimir Nabokov

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679723404 ISBN 13: 9780679723400

Publisher: Vintage, 1989

Synopsis

The novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men's clothing emporium store.  Ruddy, self-satisfied, and thoroughly masculine, he is perfectly repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife Martha.  Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead, the myopic Franz. Newly arrived in Berlin, Franz soon repays his uncle's condescension in his aunt's bed.

About this title

About the Author:

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins.

The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri.

Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions--which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.

From AudioFile:

When the naïve, provincial Franz becomes entangled in an affair with his uncle's wife, Martha Dreyer, he finds himself caught in a dangerous love triangle. As Martha becomes more intent on murdering her husband, she enslaves Franz in her diabolical plan. But the lovers find that the perfect plot for murder leads to numerous complexities. Christopher Lane's narration is utterly mesmerizing. His deep voice and measured pace capture the ominous undertones that Nabokov supplies throughout the novel. Without missing a beat, Lane's vocal characterizations are wonderfully diverse. He conveys the sensual and malicious nature of Nabokov's vicious femme fatale as flawlessly as he stammers the thoughts of the bumbling Franz. With his fluid and compelling performance, Lane's delivery of this tantalizing novel resonates with richness. D.M.W. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0679723404
• ISBN 13: 9780679723400
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272