Category: Vladimir Nabokov

Dreams are boring. On the list of tedious conversation topics, they fall somewhere between the five-day forecast and golf. As for writing about them, even Henry James, whos seldom accused of playing to the cheap seats, had a rule: Tell a dream, lose a reader. I can remember when I accepted that my own unconscious…

Few things are more tempting to a writer than to write about writing. Having a couple of novels behind me, along with a dozen short stories, hundreds of pages of clickbait headlines (which I am not particularly proud of), as well as a number of academic texts, I know a thing or two about the…

Razor A short story written by Vladimir Nabakov tells the story of an exiled Russian that comes into contact with their former torturer. It was written in 1926. Paragraph one (Ivanov analysis) Ivanov, an exiled Russian, and former Berlin-based military officer took up a job as a barber; a fitting role, Nabokov says, as Ivanov’s…