The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

A startling andrevelatory examination of Nabokov’s life and works—notably Pale Fire andLolita—bringing new insight into one of the twentieth century’s mostenigmatic authors.

Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of hiscentury, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fleeingFrance with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis.He repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering towrite artful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in theEnglish language really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him byso many critics?

Using information from newly-declassified intelligence files andrecovered military history, journalist Andrea Pitzer argues that far from beinga proponent of art for art’s sake, Vladimir Nabokov managed to hide disturbinghistory in his fiction—history that has gone unnoticed for decades. Nabokovemerges as a kind of documentary conjurer, spending the most productive decadesof his career recording a saga of forgotten concentration camps and searingbigotry, from World War I to the Gulag and the Holocaust. Lolitasurrenders Humbert Humbert’s secret identity, and reveals a Nabokov appalled byAmerican anti-Semitism. The lunatic narrator of Pale Fire recallsRussian tragedies that once haunted the world. From Tsarist courts to Nazi filmsets, from CIA front organizations to wartime Casablanca, the story ofNabokov’s family is the story of his century—and both are woven inextricablyinto his fiction.