Vladimir Vladimirovič Nabokov Volgorde van de boeken

One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator. Initially an almost grotesquely comic figure, Pnin gradually grows in stature by contrast with those who laugh at him. Whether taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has not mastered or throwing a faculty party during which he learns he is losing his job, the gently preposterous hero of this enchanting novel evokes the reader’s deepest protective instinct. Serialized in The New Yorker and published in book form in 1957, Pnin brought Nabokov both his first National Book Award nomination and hitherto unprecedented popularity.

Lente in Fialta, in Amerika en Engeland verschenen onder de titel Nabokov's Dozen is een collectie van dertien verhalen. Ze werden door Vladimir Nabokov in de periode 1931-1952 geschreven, ten dele in het Russisch, ten dele in het Engels en in het Frans. Behalve het schitterende titelverhaal treft men hier aan de vermaarde short stories "Mademoiselle O" en "Eerste liefde", waarvan Nabokov zegt dat ze '(afgezien van de namen) overeenkomen met elk detail uit zijn leven zoals de schrijver het zich herinnert.'