Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor [Hardback]

A rich gathering of the brilliant author's previously uncollected Russian and English prose and interviews, edited by Nabokov experts Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy

"I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child": so Nabokov infamously wrote when introducing his 1973 volume of selected prose, Strong Opinions. This new collection follows it up with public writings starting in 1921, opening with an essay about life at Cambridge and carrying through to Nabokov's final interviews in 1977. The chronological order of Think, Write, Speak allows us to watch the Cambridge student and the fledgling Berlin reviewer and poet turn into the acclaimed Paris émigré novelist whose stature would bring him to teach and write in America, where international success would arrive and propel him back to Europe as a recognized literary master. Straddling Russian, French and Anglophone worlds, Nabokov discovers contemporary literature and culture at his own pace and with his own strong dispositions. Whether his subject is Proust or Pushkin, the sport of boxing or the privileges of democracy, Nabokov's supreme individuality and his keen sense of the features of any particular epoch, especially his own day, illuminate the page and remind us why he has been called the greatest prose stylist of the twentieth century.