Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement

Adopting the modernist master Vladimir Nabokov as its guide, Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement is an exploration of the radically changing social, historical, technological, and literary culture of the early 20th century, a time when modes of communication and transportation, especially, were changing society in drastic and profound ways. Across seventy microchapters that are by turn serious, ironic, informative, and playful, and which take on topics such as automobiles, trains, airplanes, electricity, elevators, advertisements, telegraphs, and telephones, Yuri Leving offers new ways to understand Nabokov, Russian literature, and technology, modernism, and world material culture. Nabokov's writings are analyzed against a broad context of prose and poetry and from the point of view of what Leving calls the poetics of urbanism in literature. Nabokov in Motion is a ground-breaking exploration of urban and material themes in literature and creates a complex and vibrant cultural fabric of which Nabokov is the master weaver.

Table of Contents:
1. Chaos and Order On the Poetics of Urbanism Bodies and Texts From Chaos to Order The Urban Infrastructure, or “What Lies Beneath the Asphalt of the Text?” The Resurrection of Electricity Buildings, Stairs, Elevators The Life of Things The Telephone: A Conduit to the Other World The Street Advertisement The Shop Window of Metatexts 2. The Train as a New Locus of Myth Creation in Literature The Topos of the Beginning The Railroad as a Metaliterary Device The Railroad Metaphor Childhood and the Locomotive: A Model of the World Toys and Reasons The Station/Depot The Hierarchy of Classes The Existential Nature of the Journey by Rail The Killing Power of the Train and Engine The Train Wreck Conductor to Immortality The Mythology of the Train The Esoteric Language of Trains Train. Love. Fate The Boredom of the Road An Erotic Encounter Violence and the Railroad The Poetics of Description Personification and Animation Cliches: Russians and the Railroad On the Road and Longing for Russia Nabokov and Tsvetaeva: Synoptic Chart of a Dialog The Beckoning Distance Telegraph Poles The View from the Train Window The Underground 3. The Automobile in the Works of Nabokov: The Semantics of Driving and the Metaliterary Process Auto vs. Train The Ride to School The Nabokovs' American Cars Driving Experience The Model Car controls (a Novel on Wheels) “Crossroads of Life”: The Symbolism of Driving Worlds Unknown to Each Other Metaphysics of the Garage The Route Through the Text The Automobile in the Landscape Vehicular Mimicry Sex in a Car An Incident on the Street Forewarnings The Car Accident Death of the Hero The Furniture Truck 4. Symbolism of the Airplane: Breakthrough to Another Dimension The Airplane Schematic Flight in the Russian Periodical Press in the 1910s “And the Steel Bird Will Fly”: The Airplane in Russian Poetry in the Early Twentieth Century The Magic of Names Insects, Birds, and Fish On the Genesis and Context of Nabokov's Poem, “The Airplane” The Music of Flight Flight and Performance The Aesthetics of Public Death Death of the Pilot War in the Air The Futurist Thesaurus Overcoming Gravity: Hymn to the Airplane Flights, Dreaming, and Waking The Last Station Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Yuri Leving is University Research Professor at Dalhousie University, Canada. He is the author of nine books and editor of six volumes, including Shades of Laura: Vladimir Nabokov's Last Novel The Original of Laura (2013); Anatomy of a Short Story: Nabokov's Puzzles, Codes, “Signs and Symbols” (Bloomsbury, 2012), and Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl – Vladimir Nabokov's Novel in Art and Design (2013). Leving is the founding editor of the Nabokov Online Journal and served as a commentator on the first authorized Russian edition of The Collected Works of Vladimir Nabokov in five volumes.

Review :
Leving has 'broken the mould' of Nabokov scholarship. He gives us a dynamic Nabokov who embraced modernity rather than hid from it. The visual richness of this book is stunning; it is both the highest form of scholarship and a kind of pedagogic aid to the experience of travel in Russian modernity. What emerges through an accumulation of a very great number of facts and examples in Nabokov in Motion is a feeling that one has almost visited the world of the early 1900s and felt firsthand the thrill of contemplating the final glory of rail travel and the arrival of automobiles and airplanes as the transportation of the future. Yuri Leving does an excellent job of subjecting bygone days to philological science while completely avoiding the all-too-common structuralist flaw of stripping the old world of all of its charm. Here, charm is ever-present. This book is absolutely brilliant. The entire Russian literature of the early 20th century (including the nearly forgotten authors) is analyzed in the context of symbols of urbanization and new industrial aesthetics. Masterly layering associations, intersections of images, and plots, Leving convincingly demonstrates Russian literature as a single metatext.