Table of Contents

Foreword by Brian Boyd Introduction – Shakespeare, Nabokov, and Me I.“The Sun’s a Thief:” Nabokov’s Shakespeare Introduction Nabokov, English and English Literature Theme A Taxonomy of Nabokov’s Shakespeareanisms Preview II.The Russian Works The Tragedy of Mr. Morn “Shakespeare” Translations Early Prose The Wood Sprite Glory, The Gift, Invitation to a Beheading Laughter in the Dark Despair The English Novels III.“Which is Sebastian?”: What’s in a (Shakespearean and Nabokovian) Name? IV.No Left Turn, or Something Rotten the State: Bend Sinister and Hamlet V.Hurricane Lolita: The Nabokovian Tempest VI.Tempest Point on the Bohemian Sea: PNIN VII.The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet: Pale Fire and “Timon of Athens” VIII.“O What a Noble Mind:”: Ada and Hamlet IX.The Last Novels Transparent Things Look at the Harlequins! X.A Miscellany of Other English Works That in Aleppo Once Eugene Onegin Speak, Memory Reviews and Notes XI.Concluding Thoughts Appendix 1 – A Quantitative Approach Works Consulted Notes Index

Promotional Information

Explores the many ways in which Shakespeare, the greatest writer of the English language, influences Nabokov, arguably the finest modern English prose stylist. 

About the Author

Samuel Schuman served as the Garrey Carruthers Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of New Mexico, and Chancellor Emeritus of the University of Minnesota, Morris and the University of North Carolina, Asheville, USA. He is past President of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society and author of Vladimir Nabokov: A Reference Guide. He has published extensively on Nabokov as well as on British Renaissance Drama.

Reviews

Shakespeare and Nabokov are literary giants in their respective cultural traditions. In his spectacular Nabokov's Shakespeare, Samuel Schuman presents a remarkable face-off and solves several of the remaining riddles about the writers' literary enigmas.
*Yuri Leving, Professor of Russian Literature, Dalhousie University, Canada, and Editor of the Nabokov Online Journal.*

Samuel Schuman has provided a fine-grained analysis of Shakespearean motifs and allusions in Nabokov’s work. His careful interpretation of Shakespearean references offers fresh illumination on such major works as Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada.
*Julian W. Connolly, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Virginia, USA*

Nabokov’s Shakespeare provides readers with “a very fantastical banquet,” as Benedick puts it in Much Ado about Nothing. This exciting, accessible, wide-ranging volume sparkles with the glint of literary discovery as it traces the many ways in which one great writer can read another. Samuel Schuman confidently explores the infinite variety of Nabokov’s evocations, citations, homages, parodies, and translations of Shakespeare, across the entire range of his Russian and especially his English works. After reading Nabokov’s Shakespeare, you will better appreciate English literature’s two most brilliant wordsmiths. And you will indeed know Nabokov’s Shakespeare—including the themes of loss, banishment, and art’s transcendent magic that he shared with his predecessor, the particular scenes from the plays that he staged and restaged in his own works, and even his favorite line in all of Shakespeare’s writing. Schuman’s book offers endless riches to Nabokov scholars, and to anyone who simply loves literature.
*Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Associate Professor of English, College of the Holy Cross, co-editor of the Vladimir Nabokov Electronic Forum (NABOKV-L), and past president of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society*

Samuel Schuman is one of the most trustworthy, measured, and responsible Nabokov critics whose scholarly credibility in both Shakespearean and Nabokovian circles makes him singularly suited to account for Nabokov’s insistent and purposive use of Shakespeare’s works in the texture and structure of his own. And Schuman’s project is a very timely one: all previous work on Nabokov and Shakespeare has been done mainly through a handful of essays, all of which are well done but deliver only glancing blows to the topic. The great strength of this book is the comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare’s presence in Nabokov’s work, and Nabokov’s Shakespeare would be worth buying just for Schuman’s wide-ranging and convincing explication of the long Shakespearean discussion and the Krug/Hamlet parallels in Bend Sinister. The book’s other strengths are Schuman’s conscientious scholarship, clear principles of organization and argument, and the writing’s stout resistance of academic hyperbole and unproductive theoretical complexity.
*Zoran Kuzmanovich, Professor of English, Davidson University, USA, and editor of Nabokov Studies*

A well-known Nabokov scholar, who also wrote Vladimir Nabokov: A Reference Guide (1979), Schuman has done a fine job of explicating Shakespeare's role in Nabokov's oeuvre. Nabokov's earliest reference to the Bard is the 1924 poem “Shakespeare.” That work was soon followed by a five-act play, The Tragedy of Mr. Morn, that echoes Shakespeare in its structure, form, and intonations … This is solid scholarship on an intriguing writer. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
*CHOICE*