English professor's book garners international acclaim

26 November 2014
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Letters to Véra, edited and translated by Distinguished Professor in English Brian Boyd of the Faculty of Arts and Dr Olga Voronina of Bard College, has garnered critical acclaim in multiple recent long-form reviews.

Vladimir Nabokov’s previously unpublished letters to his wife Véra Slonim were described by the Spectator as “some of the most rapturous love letters anyone has ever written”. In this publication they are presented with an introduction by Brian and copious notes. Literary Review described the “exemplary translation and annotation” as making the collection “something of a biography in itself”.

No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer lasted longer than Nabokov's. Véra shared his delight at the enchantment of life's trifles and literature's treasures, and he rated her as having the best and quickest sense of humour of any woman he had met. From their meeting in 1921, Nabokov's letters to his beloved Véra form a narrative arc that tells a 46-year-long love story, and they are memorable in their entirety.

The Times Literary Supplement praised this “impressive achievement” as “copiously annotated and amply indexed, it is extremely user-friendly… the richly textured, eminently readable translations by Brian and Olga Voronina are admirably faithful. An enormous amount of research has gone into the annotation, and a generation of scholars of the emigration will be in Brian and Voronina’s debt.”

The Times Literary Supplement describes Nabokov’s playful, romantic and pithy letters  as “some of the most moving passages he would ever write, full of alternately impressionistic and exquisitely detailed glimpses at the world around him, which he portrays as almost painfully beautiful”.

The book was released in hardback in the Penguin Classics series in September and it was described by the Telegraph as a “handsome and meticulously edited edition”. Other editions are forthcoming in the United States, China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and in the original Russian.

Read the review in the Times Literary Supplement
Read the review in the Literary Review
Read the review in the Telegraph