Vladimir Nabokov.

THIS is a clearly written, unpretentious introduction to Nabokov's fiction. If that were all it was, the extensive bibliography of secondary criticism would give one cause to wonder whether it was really necessary. But perhaps there is more going on here than at first appears. The book is a contribution to the Macmillan Modern Novelists series, and so it has to give a fair amount of space to all of Nabokov's novels. Rampton can get away with omitting the short stories, and he has deliberately ignored King, Queen, Knave, Pnin, and Transparent Things. Pity about Pnin. Otherwise his coverage of the novels is complete. Whether this is considered a wise course of action will depend on each individual reader,s opinion about Nabokov's achievement. I mean whether he thinks that, however accomplished Nabokov may be, Lolita stands head and shoulders above the rest of his fiction. I happen to think it does, and I gained a strong impression that Rampton thinks so too. Lolita is the only one of the novels to which he devotes a whole chapter, and it is the best chapter in the book. But it could have done to have been twice the length. I wondered why Rampton had allowed the structure of his book to skew its argument and give a misleading impression of the way he sees the overall development of Nabokov's career?

A paraphrase of his argument would suggest that he takes a sensible view of this. Nabokov grew to his Russian maturity in the shadow of the symbolist and Acmeist poets, and much of his early writing was in the forin of poetry. Where it was in prose, it was still indebted to symbolist poetry and the example of prose writers like Bely who had themselves been influenced by the Russian symbolists. Also, Nabokov's apprentice novels display some of the common features of emigre Russian writing. They use the devices of symbolist literature in a somewhat half-hearted way, failing to carry forward …