Collected Poems

by Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri Nabokov (Translator)

Nabokov's masterly Collected Poems span the decades of his career, from 'Music', written in 1914, to the short, playful 'To Vera', composed in 1974. 'The University Poem', one of Nabokov's major poetic works, is here in English for the first time: an extraordinary autobiographical poem looking back at his time at Cambridge, with its dinners, girls and memories, it is suffused with rich description, wit and verbal dexterity. Included too are the surreally comic 'A Literary Dinner', the enchanting, 'Eve', the wryly humorous 'An Evening of Russian Poetry' and a meditation on the act of creation, 'Tolstoy', as well as verse written on America, lepidoptery, sport, love and Nabokov's Russian homeland.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Russian Literature, Russia, 20th Century, Fiction, Classic Literature

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Vladimir Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Набоков) was a writer defined by a life of forced movement and extraordinary linguistic transformation. Born into a wealthy, liberal aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia, he grew up trilingual, speaking Russian, English, and French in a household that nurtured his intellectual curiosities, including a lifelong passion for butterflies. This seemingly idyllic, privileged existence was abruptly shattered by the Bolshevik Revolution, which forced the family into permanent exile in 1919. This early, profound experience of displacement and the loss of a homeland became a central, enduring theme in his subsequent work, fueling his exploration of memory, nostalgia, and the irretrievable past.
The first phase of his literary life began in Europe, primarily in Berlin, where he established himself as a leading voice among the Russian émigré community under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin". During this prolific period, he penned nine novels in his native tongue, showcasing a precocious talent for intricate plotting and character study. Works like The Defense explored obsession through the extended metaphor of chess, while Invitation to a Beheading served as a potent, surreal critique of totalitarian absurdity. In 1925, he married Véra Slonim, an intellectual force in her own right, who would become his indispensable partner, editor, translator, and lifelong anchor.
The escalating shadow of Nazism necessitated another, urgent relocation in 1940, this time to the United States. It was here that Nabokov undertook an extraordinary linguistic metamorphosis, making the challenging yet resolute shift from Russian to English as his primary language of expression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945, solidifying his new life in North America. To support his family, he took on academic positions, first founding the Russian department at Wellesley College, and later serving as a highly regarded professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959.
During this academic tenure, he also dedicated significant time to his other great passion: lepidoptery. He worked as an unpaid curator of butterflies at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His scientific work was far from amateurish; he developed novel taxonomic methods and a groundbreaking, highly debated theory on the migration patterns and phylogeny of the Polyommatus blue butterflies, a hypothesis that modern DNA analysis confirmed decades later.
Nabokov achieved widespread international fame and financial independence with the publication of Lolita in 1955, a novel that was initially met with controversy and censorship battles due to its provocative subject matter concerning a middle-aged literature professor and his obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The novel's critical and commercial success finally allowed him to leave teaching and academia behind. In 1959, he and Véra moved permanently to the quiet luxury of the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he focused solely on writing, translating his earlier Russian works into meticulous English, and studying local butterflies.
His later English novels, such as Pale Fire (1962), a complex, postmodern narrative structured around a 999-line poem and its delusional commentator, cemented his reputation as a master stylist and a technical genius. His literary style is characterized by intricate wordplay, a profound use of allusion, structural complexity, and an insistence on the artist's total, almost tyrannical, control over their created world. Nabokov often expressed disdain for what he termed "topical trash" and the simplistic interpretations of Freudian psychoanalysis, preferring instead to focus on the power of individual consciousness, the mechanics of memory, and the intricate, often deceptive, interplay between art and perceived "reality". His unique body of work, straddling multiple cultures and languages, continues to

Reviews

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's one of my favorite pieces:

The rain has flown and burnt up in flight.
I tread the red sand of a path.
Golden orioles whistle, the rowan is in bloom,
the catkins on sallows are white.

The air is refreshing, humid and sweet.
How good the caprifole smells!
Downward a leaf inclines its tip
and drops from its tip a pearl.

This is no-holds-barred poetry from the pen of the great Sirin. Nabokov, in the poetic precision of his prose, had the natural gift for poetry since his adolescence as is evident from the sophomore poem Music written when he was only fifteen years of age.

Midst everyday nighttime, there sparkles
a music with billowing might,
that plays like a fountain harmonious
o'er the crowd's noisome, philistine plight.

This is poetry that is as nonchalant as it is intense in its use of rhyme and metaphor. Nabokov had the poet's grace while performing as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. And in his poetry, in particular, he lets loose all the tricks and artistry that had gone on the signify the unparalleled cadence of his prose. That is quite natural when considering the fact that he considered himself primarily as a poet.

This collection marks the first translation into English of one of his most autobiographical pieces The University Poem rendered superbly in English by his son, Dimitri Nabokov. It is longer than most of his other poems and can give the longer and much more eulogised verses of Pale Fire a good challenge.

[Alana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love me some dude poetry because I get to learn so much about their penis and their shames, Nabokov is no different. Except! he can wax-on-wax-off a fantastic lyric à la Eugene Onegin about the mid bitch he dated in college and I’m still strapped stat in rapt; I can’t play chess yet I find my attentions tangled at the bottom of knight’s polished hooves; butterflies, reminiscent of their inchoate larval past lives, blush as their flitting calls to any curious little thing to graze Nabokov’s big fat monsterly aplomb of a brain. He’s well endowed in areas a plenty, he’s oh so stuffy, corny to be sure, his books are better, and I can’t help but love him all the same. Find me clutching a pocket sized dictionary (obviously only made with the breeches of giants in mind) just to catch a glimpse of what he is on about this time. A refrigerator awakening in the middle of the night compared to the dying moans of a mythical beast, he can write a wonderful poem about anything, a grapefruit, to find memory and its beautiful faults pressed upon the world as the seat of consciousness.

“But one day while disrupting the strata of sense and descending deep down to my wellspring
I saw mirrored, besides my own self and the world, something else, something else, something else.“

[Laurent De Maertelaer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dit is de 'definitieve' collectie van de verzamelde gedichten. De nieuwe uitgave bij Koppernik, knap vertaald door Huub Beurskens, is hierop gebaseerd. Ik las de twee edities naast elkaar, er zijn enkele subtiele verschillen, in het bijzonder de noten achterin deze editie zijn uitgebreider en meer gedetailleerd. De lange inleiding is bijzonder revelerend en erudiet.
Nabokov was geen groot dichter, maar voor de fans zit hier toch meer dan genoeg materiaal in om van te smullen. Enkele nooit eerder gepubliceerde jeugdgedichten bijvoorbeeld, of het lange, geweldige gedicht 'The university poem'.

[Laurent De Maertelaer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mijn recensie staat hier: https://thedreamlifeofbalsosnell.org/...

&

hier:http://mappalibri.be/?navigatieid=61&...

[Abigail]

Not gonna lie: cried a bit.

[Anouk Felicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nabokov is de woordkunstenaar onder de woordkunstenaars - zowel in het Russisch als in het Engels.

[Kit McEvoy Gould · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing good poetry in your second language is mad. The fact that the translated Russian poem's are often beautiful is impressive (and how lovely that his son translated many of them?!).

My favourites are the poem on translating Eugene Onegin, and Dandelions.

[Antonia · Rating 4 out of 5]

What's lost forever is immortal; and this eternity inverted is the proud soul's beatitude

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dud. Two poems were memorable: ‘A Discovery’ (on butterflies) and ‘I Like That Mountain.’ Both are moving and - to use a phrase Nabokov marked his students down for using - simple and sincere. The rest are over-thought and over-wrought.

[Cathérine · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 ster

[anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easter
For his father’s death

I see a radiant cloud, I see a rooftop glisten
like a mirror, far away … I listen
to breathing shade, light’s stillicide …
You’re absent – why? You’re dead, and on a day
the humid world is bluish. God’s sacred spring is on her way,
       swelling, calling … And you’ve died.

And yet, if every stream anew the wonder sings,
and yet, if every falling golden thaw-drop rings –
if these are not bedazzling lies,
but quivering, dulcet convocations: ‘Rise again’ –
a mighty ‘Blossom!’, then you are in this refrain,
       you’re in this splendor, you’re alive! …

La première chose que je me dois de signaler est le véritable travail sur la structure et la langue dans les poèmes de Nabokov (même si ce sont ici des traductions), et ce par rapport aux tendances de la poésie contemporaine plus libre, plus ‘désordonnée’, qui se concentre davantage sur une montée en tension pour ensuite donner quelques vers puissants et résonnants (en tout cas c’est ce que j’ai observé). Ici, Nabokov s’attache à une pratique plus ‘traditionnelle’ de la poésie qui fait du poème un tout et dont il est difficile de dissocier ou d’en sortir quelques vers. Le poème ne fonctionne qu’en sont ensemble, c’est une unité méticuleusement construite de beauté. Je regrette d’avoir lu cette édition en EPUB, car je voulais faire des annotations croisées, ce que le format ne permets pas. Bref, plus j’aime un livre et moins j’arrive à en parler, les poèmes sont tout bonnement exceptionnels.

Il y également dans ce livre la meilleure description d’une larme que j’aie jamais lu :

“Abruptly, from beneath a throbbing eyelash,
emerged as from a chrysalis a bright ray
and down her ruddy-swarthy cheek,
glistening, a round diamond rolled …”

Mes préférés sont : “I Like That Mountain”, “Home” et “Remembrance”.

author's tag

[Luke Balls-Burgess · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you were ever unsure where to start with or even just intimidated by Nabokov - I can't imagine many better ways for him to seduce you outside of his collected poems.

Without having to confront the immorality of 'Lolita' or the chronicle of 'Ada or Ardor' or the many layers to his other works, you can indulge yourself in Nabokov's charming, flowery language to your souls content within these pages.

Particular highlights for me including 'The University Poem', 'Remembrance' & 'An Evening of Russian Poetry' - these collected poems come in many forms, both epic and shattering.

[lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

i thought i‘d gave it 2-4 stars because the translated works were a bit disappointing but once i started with the originally english poems, vladimir nabokov had me screaming, throwing up, crying, sobbing, screaming

[Hanna Knölke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was truly an incredible collection. The way Nabokov writes always amazes me.

[aliya · Rating 3 out of 5]

i always find it difficult to rate a collection because i loved some poems and didn’t really care for others. overall still very good and well written

[Kara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only connected with 9 poems lol but those 9 were life shattering bangers.

[annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

no one writes like nabokov.

[Nile]

Only a partial read as a good portion was in Poems and Problems which I read a few months ago, so skipped those.

Nabokov was astute enough to know what of his work was worth translating and publishing. Nothing much that he translated and left out of Poems and Problems, or that he never bothered to translate but his son had which was published here, was worth the time.

[Sebastian · Rating 3 out of 5]

So far I've just read the English poems, most of them were splendid. I really do enjoy reading them to myself in bed. Notable: That's a good thing, it's not depressing. They're very sonorous, yet they do lack a bit of immersion. What they're not lacking at all is wit. Also notable: I'm not the biggest fan of atypical rhyme schemes.

[Steph De Mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I'm an admirer of Nabokov as a novelist, this collection represents my first foray into his poetry. Much is familiar here, in terms both of theme and writing style, and I enjoyed many of the poems in this collection.

"The Mother" is particularly striking, and feels as though it could have inspired Colm Tóibín's novella, "The Testament of Mary".  "I have no need, for my nocturnal travels", "Hotel Room", and "The Poets" are also favourites of mine. By contrast, "Lilith" is deeply disturbing (and clearly a precursor to "Lolita"); I'd quite like to forget it. "The University Poem" has a personal resonance for me, as it's set in and around my college at the University of Cambridge; I very much enjoyed reading this amusing account of Nabokov's student years.

Overall, two features particularly stand out for me in this collection of poems. First, Nabokov's affinity for language and rich, synesthetic imagery is a delight. Second, he writes very much as a poet in exile: his love of, and yearning for, Russia is a recurring theme in these poems, often to the degree that certain of these may be read as love poems in which Nabokov's native country figures as the character of the beloved, or object of desire.

As is often the case with wide-ranging collections of a poet's output, these poems vary in terms both of quality and interest. Thus, I rate the collection three stars, but Nabokov's best poems certainly merit a higher rating.

[Mark Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mixed bag technically and thematically speaking and also (to this inexpert eye) in terms of quality. The signature characteristics of Nabokov’s prose are also evident in his verse, for better and worse. Consequently, it is necessary to work through a certain amount of pretentiousness, self-pity and what we might politely call idealization of extreme youth, which occasionally crosses over into darker territory. But it is worth it because in amongst the occasional squeamish moments is some stuff of real pathos and beauty.

We So Firmly Believed was a standout for me:

We so firmly believed in the linkage of life,
but now I’ve looked back – and it is astonishing
to what a degree you, my youth,
seem in tints not mine, in traits not real.

If one probes it, it’s rather like a wave’s haze
between me and you, between shallow and sinking,
or else I see telegraph poles and you from the back
as right into the sunset you ride your half-racer.

You’ve long ceased to be I. You’re an outline – the hero
of any first chapter; yet how long we believed
that there was no break in the way from the damp dell
to the alpine heath.

[Reece · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a great whistle-stop ride through the mind of one of my favourite writers. He writes like someone finding their voice, and while I can't confirm the time period of the works, there is definitely an evolution of the style.

The full impact of his work is unfortunately held back by the English/Russian language barrier. Some of the meaning is lost in translation, and when Nabakov actually writes in English, his work definitely regressed to a more simplistic style.

I can't say I enjoyed every single poem resonated, I'm sure more than a few existed as writing exercises, probably never meant for publication. Some really did demonstrate what would come later, such as Lilith, whose language and subject matter echo Lolita so obviously.

To list my favourite poems from this collection;
Revolution, Easter (for his father's death), Spring, The Train Wreck, The Mother, In Paradise, Lilith.

[kiara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps my text is incomplete.
A poet's death is, after all, a question of technique, a neat enjambment, a melodic fall.

And here a life had come apart in darkness, and the room had grown a ghostly thorax, with a heart unknown, unloved - but not alone.

(Vladimir Nabokov, ‘The Room’, p.142)

Nabokov engages with beautiful, flowery language and imagery that encourages the reader to think about the transient nature of life (and death, alongside the grief that comes with it), fleeting romance, the picturesque natural world and power of poetry and literature.

A few poems that stand out:
‘Music’, ‘The Last Supper’, ‘Easter’, ‘Shakespeare’, ‘To The Grapefruit’, ‘A Literary Dinner’, ‘The Room’, ‘Remembrance’, ‘Dandelions’.

[Cait · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's hard to review a collection of poetry: some I loved, some I disliked, some I didn't feel anything at all. My opinion on Nabokov also makes this a little difficult - he's incredibly talented, but I can't get away from Lolita: something he actually wrote a poem about. It's a great collection, regardless, and definitely displays the breadth of his talent!

'Alone, unknown, unloved, I die...and the room had grown a ghostly thorax, with a heart unknown, unloved - but not alone (The Room)

[Wito · Rating 4 out of 5]

Het heeft vlgns mij zo ongeveer een half jaar geduurd maar hij js eindelijk uit. Tja met de dichtkunst van Nabokov heb ik een beetje een haat liefde relatie. Het grootste gedeelte van de gedichten in deze bundel zijn vertaald uit het russisch gelukkig wel door Nabokov zelf of zijn zoon. Maar doe gedichten lopen soms toch niet helemaal ideaal. De metrums die Nabokov gebruikt voelen soms wat houterig maar dat komt ook omdat je eraan moet wennen. Uiteindelijk kon ik het zeker waarderen. Hetzelfde geld ook voor de rijmschema's die gebruikt worden. Toch wel nog ff een verdiende 4 sterren.

[Kae !! · Rating 5 out of 5]

hear me out, i just know this man could fix me. cant elaborate on that, i just need yall to believe me on this one <3 los poemas k tiene sobre la propia poesía, el arte de la traducción y el tono íntimo y elegante k tiene este tío hacen k de mortales para atrás con todos sus poemas dios me gusta tanto nabokov!!!

[ADDVIOLENCE]

Making a provocative poem where you pretend to like little girls is low key crazy when you already did a novel about it Vladimir is the original troll and hes bitchy asf in the notes section like super bitchy shading everyone and implying the reader is stupid if they dont agree with him on what hes saying and here's my fav line
"All thorn, but cousin to your rose."

[Tim Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

For instance,
love automatically rhymes with blood,
nature with liberty, sadness with distance,
humane with everlasting, prince with mud,
moon with a multitude of words, but sun
and song and wind and life and death with none.

[Elisabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely a favourite ❤️

[geneva · Rating 4 out of 5]

wonderful. i would kill to understand the thought process behind some of his work. i am desperate