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 ... Read moremotifs 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.
D. B. Johnson, University of California, Santa Barbara
CHOICE
Show Less