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Nabokov and the Russian Diaspora: In the Margins of Totalitarianism
Author(s): Bryan Karetnyk (Author)
- Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
- Publication Date: October 2, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 309 pages
- ISBN-10: 3031900170
- ISBN-13: 9783031900174
Book Description
This book presents a sustained and systematic analysis of the totalitarian topos across Vladimir Nabokov’s life and career. Contributing to the ongoing reappraisal of Nabokov’s writing in its engagement with politics and ideology, this study contends that the rise of totalitarianism constituted one of the most urgent, substantial and complex issues with which Nabokov and his peers in emigration had to contend. Yet while the precarious exilic status of the Russian diaspora not only made the spread of totalitarian ideologies and dictatorships an acute and tangible danger, it also, perversely, afforded its members exceptionally free scope to respond intellectually and creatively, as individuals outside and on the limits of these systems. This is the first book that critically and comprehensively examines Nabokov’s literary and intellectual responses to the rise of totalitarian systems and ideologies, contextualizing them within those of his peers in the first wave of Russian emigration.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Nabokov and the Russian Diaspora: In the margins of totalitarianism meticulously documents how the novelist addressed the totalitarian regimes he witnessed from two ends of Europe. The book begins by situating Nabokov’s views on totalitarianism within those of the first generation of Russian émigrés to escape the Soviet Union. Here, Karetnyk’s range is nothing short of extraordinary.” (José Vergara, TLS The Times Literary Supplement, March 20, 2026)
About the Author
Bryan Karetnyk is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is a scholar of Russian literature and culture. His research focuses on the writing of the Russian diaspora, with a particular emphasis on the intersection between literature and politics in the twentieth century. He has translated several major works by writers including Gaito Gazdanov, Boris Poplavsky and Yuri Felsen, and is the editor and principal translator of the landmark Penguin anthology Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky (2017). He writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times and the Spectator.
