New Releases by Vladimir

This book puts a clear emphasis on the qualitative and geometric properties of ordinary differential equations and their solutions, helping the student to get a feel for the subject. The text is rich with examples and connections with mechanics and proceeds with physical reasoning, using it as a convenient shorthand for much longer formal mathematical reasoning. 272 illustrations.

The classic novel from the author of Lolita, brilliantly portraying one man''s ruin through love and betrayal.

The wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder. • “A beautiful mystery plot, not to be revealed.” – Newsweek “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” – John Updike “One of Mr. Nabokov’s finest, most challenging and provocative novels.” – The New York Times Despair’s protagonist, Hermann, is another masterly portrait in the fascinating gallery of living characters Vladmir Nabokov has given to world literature. In his pseudo wordliness, his odd genius, Hermann is one with such other heteroclitic neurotic Nabokovian creations as Humbert Humbert and Charles Kimbote. Rapt in his own reality, incapable of escaping or explicating it, he is as solitary in his abyss as Luzhin or Charlotte Haze of Lolita. Despair is illuminated throughout by the virtuosity and cunning wit that are Vladimir Nabokov’s hallmarks.

"The nature of the icon cannot be grasped by means of pure art criticism, nor by the adoption of a sentimental point of view. Its forms are based on the wisdom contained in the theological and liturgical writings of the Eastern Orthodox Church and are imtimately bound up with the experience of the contemplative life. The present work is the first of its kind to give a reliable introduction to the spiritual background of this art. The introduction into the meaning and language of the icons by Ouspensky imparts to us in an admirable way the spiritual conceptions of the Eastern Orthodox Church which are often so foreign to us, but without the knowledge of which we cannot possibly understand the world of the icon." -- Back cover.

Reading versions of important lectures given in the 1950s demonstrate Nabokov''s critical talents and reveal his judgments on the works and achievement of Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, and Stevenson

Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov''s greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. But more: it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

Smurov, is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin, who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife.

A darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue from one of the leading writers of the twentieth century, the acclaimed author of Lolita. "Half-poem, half-prose...a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. One of the great works of art of this century." —Mary McCarthy, New York Times bestselling author of The Group An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, Vladimir Nabokov''s witty novel achieves that rarest of things in literature—perfect tragicomic balance.

Nabokov''s first novel in English, one of his greatest and most overlooked

Each of these thirteen stories is a startling evocation of a single character or happening plucked from the special world of Nabokov''s imagination: Czarist Russia, Central Europe between the two World Wars, the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. However, with the exception of Mademoiselle O and First Love, these stories bear no more than an atmospheric relation to the details of Nabokov''s own life. He writes: "I am no more guilty of imitating real life than real life is responsible for plagiarizing me." Nabokov, like Gogol, is one of those rare modern writers who have been able to create and populate an entire world out of their own genius and to sustain that world throughout a variety of works. These stories reveal that genius at its most intense.--Adapted from book jacket.

''Globalisation'' is the buzzword of the 1990s. VI Lenin''s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism was one of the first attempts to account for the increasing importance of the world market in the twentieth century. Originally published in 1916, Imperialism explains how colonialism and the First World War were inherent features of the global development of the capitalist economy. In a new introduction, Norman Lewis and James Malone contrast Lenin''s approach with that adopted by contemporary theories of globalisation. They argue that, while much has changed since Lenin wrote, his theoretical framework remains the best method for understanding recent global developments.

A political pamphlet written in 1901 and published in 1902, in which the author argues that the working class will not spontaneously become political simply by fighting economic battles with employers over wages, working hours, and the like. To educate the working class on Marxism, the author insists that Marxists should form a political party, or vanguard, of dedicated revolutionaries in order to spread Marxist political ideas among the workers. The pamphlet, in part, precipitated the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party between Lenin''s Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks--Adapted from Wikipedia.

"''Rasplata'' in no way contains ''reminiscences, '' but is simply the diary of an eye-witness, presented in the form of a narrative ... I [Commander Semenoff] kept a diary from January 30, 1904 to December 19, 1906 (even a little longer), and made daily entries, on specially important days even hourly. Everything I tell of here is based on the data of my diary"--Author''s preface.