Overview

This book explores how Vladimir Nabokov wove his deep love of trees throughout all his works, granting them a powerful role in the development of his most significant themes. In nearly all his literary works, Vladimir Nabokov inscribed networks of trees to create meaningful patterns of significance around one or more of his passionate interests in consciousness, memory, creativity, epistemology, ethics, and love, with a deep connection to nature serving as a constant undercurrent. Nabokov's Secret Trees explores this neglected area of his art, one that positions nature as a hidden but vital core of his work. The book presents an entirely new, previously unsuspected Nabokov, one who crafts intricate patterns of arboreal imagery lurking behind his often-baroque psychological narratives. It reveals how Nabokov activates arboreal potentials by exploring the hidden ubiquity of trees, their essence as complex natural phenomena, and their role as quiet presences that have accompanied and fostered human civilisation and art since their beginnings. The book uncovers how trees offer a rich and intricate field for structural, semantic, allusive, and metaphorical exploration. Based on the published corpus as well as archival materials, Nabokov's Secret Trees demonstrates that trees not only populate Nabokov's art in stunning, yet furtive, abundance, but also as mysterious natural entities, directly animating his works' worlds and his readers' experience of them.

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9781487554422

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Reviews

""Stephen Blackwell is one of our most knowledgeable Nabokov scholars and one of our most subtle and perceptive Nabokov thinkers. With a deft touch he brings together the world of the empirical naturalist Nabokov with the world of the hyper stylist and aesthetic magician Nabokov. This study of how trees are 'alive' in Nabokov's thinking across a range of his published writings and into the archives is just such a work.""--David Bethea, Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison ""Nabokov's Secret Trees makes a fundamentally new contribution to the study of Vladimir Nabokov, profoundly changing how scholars approach him. Stephen H. Blackwell writes elegantly without jargon and offers frequently brilliant interpretations of individual works to establish a new personal mythology that serves as a metaphysical baseline for reading Nabokov's texts. This is an amazingly clever and erudite work!""--Eric Naiman, Professor of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley ""Reading this imaginative, interesting, thoroughly researched book by a major Nabokov scholar is like observing the fascinating patterns of dappled light and shadow cast by a great tree in leaf, one of the writer's favourite leitmotifs. If you have never thought about Nabokov and trees before, you will now. Nabokov's Secret Trees explores an important subject - how Nabokov perceives aspects of the natural world and depicts them in his own invented landscapes - with insight, wit, and zest.""--Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities, College of the Holy Cross

"""Stephen Blackwell is one of our most knowledgeable Nabokov scholars and one of our most subtle and perceptive Nabokov thinkers. With a deft touch he brings together the world of the empirical naturalist Nabokov with the world of the hyper stylist and aesthetic magician Nabokov. This study of how trees are 'alive' in Nabokov's thinking across a range of his published writings and into the archives is just such a work.""--David Bethea, Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison ""Reading this imaginative, interesting, thoroughly researched book by a major Nabokov scholar is like observing the fascinating patterns of dappled light and shadow cast by a great tree in leaf, one of the writer's favourite leitmotifs. If you have never thought about Nabokov and trees before, you will now. Nabokov's Secret Trees explores an important subject - how Nabokov perceives aspects of the natural world and depicts them in his own invented landscapes - with insight, wit, and zest.""--Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities, College of the Holy Cross ""Nabokov's Secret Trees makes a fundamentally new contribution to the study of Vladimir Nabokov, profoundly changing how scholars approach him. Stephen H. Blackwell writes elegantly without jargon and offers frequently brilliant interpretations of individual works to establish a new personal mythology that serves as a metaphysical baseline for reading Nabokov's texts. This is an amazingly clever and erudite work!""--Eric Naiman, Professor of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley"

Author Information

Stephen H. Blackwell is a professor of Russian at the University of Tennessee. He lives in Knoxville

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