Think, Write, Speak Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor

A rich compilation of the previously uncollected Russian and English prose and interviews of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers, 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 Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote in the introduction to his volume of selected prose, Strong Opinions. Think, Write, Speak follows up where that volume left off, with a rich compilation of his uncollected prose and interviews, from a 1921 essay about Cambridge to two final interviews in 1977. The chronological order allows us to watch the Cambridge student and the fledgling Berlin reviewer and poet turn into the acclaimed Paris émigré novelist whose stature brought him to teach in America, where his international success exploded with Lolita and propelled him back to Europe. Whether his subject is Proust or Pushkin, the sport of boxing or the privileges of democracy, Nabokov’s supreme individuality, his keen wit, and his alertness to the details of life illuminate the page.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV studied at Cambridge University, then lived in Berlin and Paris, writing in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940, he moved to America, where he taught at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard, and wrote some of his greatest works, including Speak, Memory; Lolita; and Pnin. In 1959, he returned to Europe, where he wrote Pale Fire and Ada. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.

BRIAN BOYD, University Distinguished Professor of English, University of Auckland, has published on literature, art, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology, but most of all on Vladimir Nabokov, as annotator, bibliographer, biographer, critic, editor, and translator. His work has won awards on four continents.

ANASTASIA TOLSTOY is a junior research fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, where she completed a DPhil on Vladimir Nabokov. She is the co-translator, with Thomas Karshan, of Nabokov's neo-Shakespearean blank verse drama The Tragedy of Mister Morn.