Declassified documents and public records in The Secret History
What’s so secret about The Secret History? The most important history in the book is information that was once public knowledge but which has fallen out of public memory–Nabokov’s secret history as our forgotten past. But there is also some actual secret history in there: classified documents and public records that shed light on Nabokov’s life […]
Meet Carl Junghans: informer, propagandist, and… literary inspiration for Nabokov?
Vladimir Nabokov threw a Molotov cocktail into twentieth-century literature with Lolita. Alexander Solzhenitsyn survived Russian forced-labor camps and brought the word gulag into the global lexicon. Plenty of drama involving both of them appears in The Secret History, but as characters in the book they nonetheless faced competition from a lesser-known, scenery-chewing German named Carl […]
Happy birthday, Nabokov! What does the FBI have on you?
When is Vladimir Nabokov’s birthday anyway? Depending on where you look, you’ll see April 10, April 22, and April 23 listed, but which is it? The answer is… all three. As Nabokov explains in his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he was born in Russia in 1899 on April 10, but at that point in time Russia […]
