In a speech given in December 1925, Vladimir Nabokov declared that
'everything in the world plays', including 'love, nature, the arts,
and domestic puns.' All of Nabokov's novels contain scenes of
games: chess, scrabble, cards, football, croquet, tennis, and
boxing, the play of light and the play of thought, the play of
language, of forms, and of ideas, children's games, cruel games of
exploitation, and erotic play.
Thomas Karshan argues that play is Nabokov's signature theme, and
that Nabokov's novels form one of the most sophisticated treatments
of play ever achieved. He traces the idea of art as play back to
German aesthetics, and shows how Nabokov's aesthetic outlook was
formed by various Russian emigre writers who espoused those
aesthetics. Karshan then follows Nabokov's exploration of play as
subject and style through his whole oeuvre, outlining the relation
of play to other important themes such as faith, make-believe,
violence, freedom, order, work, Marxism, desire, childhood, art,
and scholarship. As he does so, he demonstrates a series of new
literary sources, contexts, and parallels for Nabokov's writing, in
writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, Pushkin,
Dostoyevsky, Bely, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, Pope, and the
humanist tradition of the literary game.
Drawing in detail on Nabokov's untranslated early essays and poems,
and on highly restricted archival material, Vladimir Nabokov and
the Art of Play provides the fullest scholarly-critical reading of
Nabokov to date, and defines the ludic aspect of his work that has
been such a vital example for, and influence on, contemporary
writers, from Orhan Pamuk, W. G. Sebald, and Georges Perec, to John
Updike, Martin Amis, and Tom Stoppard. Through Nabokov, it
addresses the literary game-playing that is one of the most
distinctive elements in post-1945 literature.
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