Nabokov and the Russian Diaspora - In the Margins of Totalitarianism

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.

List of contents

Chapter :1 Introduction.- Chapter 2: Parlor politics and open-air statements: Public and Private Responses to Bolshevism, Italian Fascism, Stalinism and Nazism.- Chapter 3: From Intellectual Response to Literary Practice: Totalitarianism and literaturnyi byt in Emigration.- Chapter 4: Totalitarian People: Poets and Dictators.- Chapter 5: Totalitarian States: Between Real and Imaginary.- Chapter 6: Totalitarian Ideas: Determinism, Philistinism and Freudianism.

Product details

• Authors: Bryan Karetnyk
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.11.2025
• EAN: 9783031900174
• ISBN: 978-3-0-3190017-4
• No. of pages: 294
• Dimensions: 148 mm x 20 mm x 210 mm
• Weight: 495 g
• Illustrations: XV, 294 p. 13 illus., 7 illus. in color.
• Series: Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > Other languages / Other literatures; Europa, Literaturwissenschaft: 1900 bis 2000, Vladimir Nabokov, Totalitarianism, Fascism, Exile, Geschichte anderer geographischer Gruppierungen und Regionen, History of Political Thought, European Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Russian, Soviet, and East European History, Russian Emigration, Diasporic Literature