Selected Poems of Vladimir Nabokov

by Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Karshan (Introduction)

Though we know Vladimir Nabokov as a brilliant novelist, his first love was poetry. This landmark collection brings together the best of his verse, including many pieces that have never before appeared in English.These poems span the whole of Nabokov’s career, from the newly discovered “Music,” written in 1914, to the short, playful “To Véra,” composed in 1974. Many are newly translated by Dmitri Nabokov, including The University Poem, a sparkling novel in verse modeled on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin that constitutes a significant new addition to Nabokov’s oeuvre. Included too are such poems as “Lilith”, an early work which broaches the taboo theme revisited nearly forty years later in Lolita, and “An Evening of Russian Poetry”, a masterpiece in which Nabokov movingly mourns his lost language in the guise of a versified lecture on Russian delivered to college girls. The subjects range from the Russian Revolution to the American refrigerator, taking in on the way motel rooms, butterflies, ice-skating, love, desire, exile, loneliness, language, and poetry itself; and the poet whirls swiftly between the brilliantly painted facets of his genius, wearing masks that are, by turns, tender, demonic, sincere, self-parodying, shamanic, visionary, and ingeniously domestic.

Genres: Poetry, Russia, Classics, Literature, World Literature

242 pages, Kindle Edition

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

[Olga · Rating 5 out of 5]

It seems to me that for Nabokov his poetry was not only a way of expressing himself but rather some sort of a secret place where he could escape from all the grief and hardships of the exile and be himself and go where he always longed to be - in his Paradise lost, filled with happy chilhood memories, in his dear Homeland, which does not exist anymore. But in his poems, like in dreams, he visits St Petersburg with its splendid squares and palaces and the family estate in Vyra with its forest, river and long summer evenings.

“I HAVE NO NEED, FOR MY NOCTURNAL TRAVELS”

I have no need, for my nocturnal travels,
of ships, I have no need of trains.
The moon’s above the checkerboard-like garden.
The window’s open. I am set.

And with habitual silence—like a tomcat,
at night over a fence—across
the border streamlet, passportless, my shadow
leaps to the other, Russian, bank.

Mysterious, invulnerable, weightless,
I glide across successive walls,
and at the moonlight, the dream rushing past him,
the border guard takes aim in vain.

I fly across the meadows, dance through forests—
and who will know that there exists
in this vast country but a single living,
a single happy citizen.

Along the lengthy quay the Neva shimmers.
All’s still. A tardy passerby
my shadow in a lonely square encounters
and curses his own fantasy.

Now I approach an unfamiliar building,
the place alone I recognize …
There, in the darkened rooms, everything’s altered,
and everything upsets my shade.

There, children sleep. Above the pillow’s corner
I stoop, and they begin to dream
about the toys that, long ago, I played with,
about my ships, about my trains.

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is divided into four sections. The first one is Poems Translated by Dmitri Nabokov, which includes “Music”, one of the first poems written in 1914. The last three parts are different sections from one collection: The Russian Poems, The English Poems and English Poems Not Included in Poems and Problems, which was published in 1969 and contains more than 50 poems and 18 chess problems. This book seems a lifetime, so the variations in style and ways of thinking must be quite remarkable.

I’ve been drawn to Russian literature for years. I believe it’s a unique way to conceive literature as a sharp and at times rather amusing study on human nature. However, Nabokov was still an enigma I’ve been afraid to (try to) solve. Even though I’m not solving much by reading this book, I can’t think of a more natural way to approach him. And it could be something special too, since poetry was this novelist’s first love – those are difficult to forget.

For happiness the lover cannot sleep

For happiness the lover cannot sleep;
the clock ticktacks; the gray-haired merchant fancies
in vermeil skies a silhouetted crane,
into a hold its cargo slowly sinking.
To gloomy exiles there appears miraged
a mist, which youth with its own hue has tinted.

Amidst the agitation and the beauty
of daily life, one image everywhere
haunts me incessantly, torments and claims me:

Upon the bright-lit island of the desk
the somber facets of the open inkstand
and the white sheet of paper, and the lamp’s
unswitched-off light beneath its green glass dome.

And left athwart the still half-empty page,
my pen like a black arrow, and the word
I did not finish writing.

June 01, 19

*

Yes, it could have been something special. No, it wasn't special; it just was. Final thoughts, much later.

July 19, 19

[Nuri · Rating 4 out of 5]

REMEMBRANCE
Like silent ships we two in darkness met,
And when some day the poet’s careless fame
Shall breathe to you a half-forgotten name—
Soul of my song, I want you to regret.
For you had Love. Out of my life you tore
One shining page. I want, if we must part,
Remembrance pale to quiver in your heart
Like moonlit foam upon a windy shore.

**************************************
Excerpts below :

THE ROOM
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.

**************************************

AN EVENING OF RUSSIAN POETRY
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.

**************************************

THE PARIS POEM
In this life, rich in patterns (a life
unrepeatable, since with a different
cast, in a different manner,
in a new theater it will be given),

no better joy would I choose than to fold
its magnificent carpet in such a fashion
as to make the design of today coincide with the past,
with a former pattern,
in order to visit again—oh, not commonplaces of those inclinations

**************************************

FAME
I’ve read in myself how the self to transcend—
and I must not be overexplicit.

Trusting not the enticements of the thoroughfare
or such dreams as the ages have hallowed,
I prefer to stay godless, with fetterless soul
in a world that is swarming with godheads.
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.

**************************************

WHAT HAPPENED OVERNIGHT
What happened overnight to memory?
It must have snowed: such stillness! Of no use
Was to my soul the study of Oblivion:
that problem has been solved in sleep.

A simple, elegant solution.
(Now what have I been bothering about
so many years?) One does not see much need
in getting up: there’s neither bed, nor body.

**************************************

THE DREAM
how grateful one is to unearthly powers
that the dead can appear in one’s sleep,
how proud of the dream, of that nighttime event,
is one’s shaken soul!

**************************************

I LIKE THAT MOUNTAIN
Shall we not climb thus
the slopes of paradise, at the hour of death,
meeting all the loved things
that in life elevated us?

**************************************
SPRING
What’s lost forever is immortal;
and this eternity inverted
is the proud soul’s beatitude.

***************************************


"HOW I LOVE YOU" and "FORTY THREE YEARS, FORTY FOUR YEARS MAYBE" and "A POEM" are some of my other favorites from the collection. Although I didn't fully grasp most of Nabokov's poems, but, in between, they get oh so surreal. Perhaps, in a future read, I'll receive these poems more deeply.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

In prose-poesy, Nabokov is sui generis, part of the movement to reinvent the language of the novel along with other modernist stylists: Joyce, Woolf, Proust. He is remembered as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, and rightfully so for his creative re-conceptualizing of the novel's form and intent in his books Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada et. al. But for all his poetic prose, he is not remembered for his poetry. This isn't especially surprising, though maybe a bit undeserved. Poetry is a realm wherein meaning is sovereign; Nabokov is resistant to meaning.

In Nabokov's Selected Poems, we find not the brimming emotion of Plath, nor the surfeit meaning of Eliot or Stevens, nor the lofty Romanticism of Keats, Byron, Shelly; Nabokov is a painter of images, sequences, in words, and that is what is striking in this collection. Indubitably, the novel is Nabokov's most amenable medium, and it is one which he mastered, and in mastering it he largely gave up poetry, but in his poetry, especially in the English poems, there are the sprouts of genius which lubricated the authors mind when composing his novels.

Perhaps Nabokov is as famous for his exile as he is for his work, and throughout this collection, which is composed of both his Russian and his English poems, there is a tension between the world that he gave up and the world he has adopted. I think especially of the poem "Lines Written in Oregon, which begins:

Esmeralda! Now we rest
Here, in the bewitched and blest
Mountain forests of the West

and goes on to claim (Europe, nonetheless, is over.) in a Nabokovian aside. There is a longing for the world which has been lost, but a reassurance that his new home, America, has a similar hidden beauty, and that his muse, Esmeralda, has come with him, making art possible though he is far from the beloved home which he recalls in Speak, Memory. Nabokov's poetry is a call for the imagination, a plea to view the world for, not necessarily its actual natural beauty, but the beauty which is made possible through your perception of it, though a childlike infinitude of the imagination. "Huddle roadsigns softly speak / Of Lake Merlin, Castle Creek" - the world is open to play, filled with an unreal beauty which Nabokov captures both in his poetry and in his novels. His novels, like his poetry, do not have the steely coldness of reality, but have a strangely warm veneer of almost fairy-tale quality, and that effervescence is the heart of his poetry in particular, the distillation of that whimsy into the meaty metrical skeleton of verse.

Nabokov's poems, unlike his novels, paint small ephemeral images rather than complete portraits of the psyche. He is a master of language, and this mastery is the seal of genius which is kissed upon his poems, though they lack the emotional fervor of other poets. They are lyrical, and metered, rhyming and ordered: like his novels, form and structure are supreme, and he greatly distances himself from the modernist free-verse poets, like Eliot. Also like his novels, the poems are peppered with puns and humor:

The room a dying poet took
at nightfall in a dead hotel
had both directories - the Book
of Heaven and the Book of Bell.

Though professionally he was an author, his passion for lepidoptery is a common thread throughout all of his fiction, this poetry collection included. And despite the fame which he garnered for Lolita his poetry shows a skepticism in the endurance of art:

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.

Though there are things in life which we find so important: literary fame, power, art, it is the small advancements in our understanding of the world which become immortalized: only knowledge is a power which endures time, which "transcends its dust."

[Moved to Library Thing adaorhell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Is there anything he can't do? Some stunners include, 'To the Grapefruit', 'Dreams', 'Lilith', 'Cubes' and 'A Demon'. Some are lush, sweet, cup running over, some are austere, cruel, upsetting (St. Petersburg, A Snow), which wavers between the collection written in English vs. the collection he (or his son) translated from the Russian. For the person who loves Nabokov, surely, but also for people who love beautiful poetry and prose.

[Caterina · Rating 5 out of 5]

"One day he turned off toward the unknown and left for good; beyond lies night, silence, and mystery." Silvery voice. Sparkling souls. Star dusted heaven. Sleepless silence. V.N is magic.

[Asher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Crispy poems. I skipped most of the notes at the end

[Jean Lamberty · Rating 4 out of 5]

The earlier poems in this collection, all translations, have forced, old fashioned language but almost all provide a window into Nabokov's passions. The later poems use more dreams and surreal images, and he plays with the sound of language with great skill.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having long been interested in the writing of Vladimir Nabokov [1], I was quite pleased to see a reasonably sized book that showed a side of Nabokov that I was unfamiliar with, his life as a poet.  Obviously, then, as someone who reads pretty widely when it comes to poems [2], I was intrigued and decided to read the book for myself.  So, is this a book worth reading?  I have to say yes, although it is by no means a complete volume of Nabokov's history.  This book reveals that Nabokov was a very serious poet and that he was skilled and accomplished in painting pictures with words and in turning his complex and sometimes disturbing mind to the poetic form in both Russian (provided here in translation) and English.  Some of these poems definitely deserve to be remembered and well-regarded alongside his famous novels, and a few of these poems even give some insight into his novels and into the way in which he transmuted his life into literature as well as the way that he engaged in various thought experiments and speculations into people that were not particularly like him.

This particular book of about 200 pages (including some absolutely essential endnotes that explain the context of the writing of the poems, their textual variants in published editions, and Nabokov's own thoughts about them) is divided into four sections.  The first section is made up of poems translated by Dmitri Nabokov from the author's early writings.  After this there is a section of Russian poems from Poems and Problems translated into English.  After this there are the English language poems from Poems and Problems and then there are English-language poems not previously published in that same edition.  As one might imagine, Nabokov is a poet who writes about issues of politics, memory, love, exile, Russian literature, and creation.  He also shows a surprising interest in religion, with poems about angels and demons as well as the Last Supper, Easter, and his travels in Oregon.  While his poems in Russian tend to have a very strict rhyme scheme, his poems in English and the poems in English translation are less strict, although they are strict enough to demonstrate that Nabokov was certainly highly conservative in his poetic forms and his strong preference for rhyme and meter over more contemporary free verse trends.

Yet in reading this poetry one gets a sense of the difficulties that Nabokov faced as an author.  For one, he was very aware of the Russian culture that he had left behind in facing exile, and a great many of his poems reflect on his alienation in profound ways.  Whether he is looking at Peter the Great's time in the Netherlands during that czar's own travels, or reflecting on life as a teacher of Russian to American and European young people, trying to encourage them to understand something of the soul of the language, or whether he is writing poetry that dances along or crosses the line over what is acceptable in various emigre literary journals, Nabokov shows himself as a writer who is hard to define and hard to characterize.  Quite daringly, he makes some complex literary puns with the names of Stalin and Churchill to show his criticism at bumptious political leaders, showing that he was willing to stick his neck out to make a point.  All in all, the poems show Nabokov to be a man with a strong sense of rhyme and meter, a very sharp eye to situations and an ability to write some very technically challenging as well as strongly evocative poetry.  If you like Russian poetry in translation there is a great deal to enjoy and appreciate here.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

[Raymonds009 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reviewed "Poems and Problems" about 1970 in a small paper in Vermont and was very dismissive. Reading this now I can not believe how naive and misguided I was. I was mostly critical of what I thought was his elitism and obscure references. Blame it on my youthful awkwardness and lack of background.

At any rate I am so happy that I took a chance on revisiting this volume. It is a wondrous masterpiece of memory and literary adventure It is worth reading just for the many references to the novels and other writings. It is all here: butterflies, Ada, Russia lost and America discovered and so many of his loves. What a joy. Pace Vladimir.

[Jennifer Juffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a fan of Russian writers. Nabokov is definitely no Pushkin, although he echoes the familiarity all Russian authors bring, which is a rich sentiment of emotive livelihood, bathed in memories of life and being unflinchingly stout in the face of death.
That being stated, I prefer his others works. Perhaps I need to become more fluent in Russian.
I studied German in school solely for the purpose of translating texts.
Nothing becomes more pure than to read in the author's native tongue.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

We've come to think of Nabokov as a novelist, but it's important to remember that one of his most famous novels, Pale Fire, centers on an extended poem; in fact, if Nabokov had not written a genuinely fine long poem, the novel would not have worked. Still, his finely wrought, at times strikingly conversational poems come as a surprise. These are well worth reading.

[Marie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nabokov, I love you, but you are no poet.

[Genevieve L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

So Nabokov's first love is poetry. Always, a pleasure to read him.

[Mark Heathcote · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great poet & a good book.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just wasn't as impressed as I had hoped to be with this. Still glad I have it and have read it though.

[Sherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous writer. Intriguing poetry by the multilingual Russian author of Lolita, a favorite novel and basis for lauded film with James Mason, Susan Lyon, Peter Sellers and Shelley Winter.

[Holly Fortune · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do not fear Nabokov's poetry. It will take you to equally as pleasant places as his prose.

[Karlie Ybarra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Nabokov's beautiful use of language, but I also really wanted this book to be over.

[Alison (The Lowrey Library) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Home,
My home magnificent is but a word
On a withered page in an old, dusty book."

[Rachel Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s fascinating to get a glimpse into Vladimir Nabokov’s poetry in this collection of poems that spans over most of the Russian-American writer’s life. From his very first poem written at his countryside estate in Russia to poems obliquely addressing his own fame and authorship later in life, Selected Poems shows Nabokov’s development as a poet as his focused shifted from poetry to prose in his life. I’m not a huge fan of poetry in general, and definitely some of the poems in this collection puzzled me; but it was interesting to read Nabokov’s lesser-known words, especially in some of his more evocative poems, ones that stuck out to me, like “Evening,” or “The Dream” or even “A Poem.” Nabokov certainly knows how to lay an impact through his words whenever he wishes. This relatively short collection was a nice way to continue rounding out my own self-imposed Vladimir Nabokov scholarship—although I still have a long way to go!

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is really good. Nabokov considered himself a poet foremost and here you can see he has a fascinating ability to capture experience through rich images. Here's one of my favorites, a shorty, called "The Glasses of St. Joseph":

Wipe off your teardrops and listen: One sunny midday, an aged
carpenter forgot his glasses on his workbench. Laughing,
a boy ran in; paused; espied; sneaked up;
and touched the airy lenses. Instantly
a sunny shimmer traversed the world, flashed across distant,
dreary lands, warming the blind, and cheering the sighted.

[Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

VN hit some real highs with his English poetry, and sometimes a translation from Russian will show flashes of brilliance. But I fear the Russian poems have lost a lot through their translation. The attention to detail, particularly the sound and rhythm, is off.

Read the English poems though. There's gems in there.

[venus · Rating 5 out of 5]

All i can do is weep and weep throw myself down at his feet and weep but despite that i feel so held by him i really do i love him so much

I wanted to write up a list of my favorites but there’s so many I don’t even know where to start

[Artem Huletski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ранние стихи не очень впечатлили, в них слишком много вот этого "ни дня без строчки". Решение двигаться в прозу было верным.

[Khaled · Rating 4 out of 5]

To quote the New York Daily News, "the poems are coy, clever, sophisticated, sonorous, and worldly. In other words, Nabokovian"

[Luda]

3.7


Not really my thing but there were some great poems. beautiful writing.

[Monika · Rating 5 out of 5]

He's just on another level

[Jason Cady · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm in the middle of reading Pale Fire and I loved the poem in that book so much I had read this. Nabokov should have written more poetry!