The Sublime Artist's Studio: Nabokov and Painting

In his youth, Vladimir Nabokov aspired to become a landscape artist. Even though he eventually realized that his true vocation was literature, his keen sense of visual detail, nuanced perception of color, and vast knowledge of the fine arts are all manifest in his literary works, which abound with painters and paintings, real and imaginary, as well as with magnificent pictorial imagery rendered in a verbal medium. The relation of the visual arts to Nabokov's work is the subject of The Sublime Artist's Studio, an in-depth and detailed study of one of the most significant facets of this modern master's oeuvre. Gavriel Shapiro pursues his inquiry throughout Nabokov's literary legacy - poetry, short prose, novels, plays, memoirs, lectures, essays, interviews, and letters. What is the import of Nabokov's lifelong fascination with the Old Masters? How does landscape function in Nabokov's writings? What was the author's relationship to contemporary artists? By addressing these and other questions, while examining Nabokov's references and allusions to the visual arts and to particular works and artists, Shapiro is able to reveal the centrality of painting to Nabokov's belles lettres. His book offers a new and promising approach to one of the twentieth century's most celebrated writers. This is an illuminating study of Nabokov's early career as a visual artist and its effect on his writing.

Table of Contents:
Note on Transliteration; List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; 1. The Formative Milieu; 2. Old Masters: The Authorial Presence; 3. Landscape: Some Roles and Functions; 4. The World of Art; 5. Richard Muther's History of Painting in the XIXth Century; 6. German Expressionists: Portrayal of Metropolis; Afterword; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author :
Gavriel Shapiro is a professor in the Department of Russian at Cornell University. He is the author of Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage and Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabakov's ""Invitation to a Beheading.

Review :
"Gavriel Shapiro's illuminating, well-written, and highly accessible book is full of surprises and demonstrates how very much more there is to know about Nabokov's knowledge and use of painting. Rich in revelations about Nabokov's knowledge of Russian and German art and many other aspects of the history of art...this work gives us an unprecedented historical and critical appreciation of Nabokov's visual sensibility." --Paul Barolsky, Commonwealth Professor, Italian Renaissance Art and Literature, University of Virginia

"Shaprio's...stimulating research includes archival materials and printed sources, old and new, seldom if ever used by Nabokov scholars." --Leona Toker, professor of English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem