Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays

A rich compilation of the previously uncollected Russian and English prose and interviews of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, edited by Nabokov experts Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child”: so Nabokov famously, and infamously, wrote when introducing his 1973 volume of selected prose, Strong Opinions. Think, Write, Speak follows up where Strong Opinions left off, presenting Nabokov’s public writings from a 1921 essay about Cambridge to two last interviews in 1977. The chronological order allows us to watch the Cambridge student and the fledgling Berlin reviewer and poet turn into the acclaimed Paris émigré novelist whose stature would bring him to teach and write in America, where his international success exploded with Lolita and propelled him back to Europe as a recognized literary master. Straddling Russian, French and Anglophone worlds, Nabokov discovers contemporary literature and culture at his own pace and with his own strong dispositions. Whether his subject is Proust or Pushkin, the sport of boxing or the privileges of democracy, Nabokov’s supreme individuality and his alertness to the details of life past and present illuminate the page and remind us why he has been called the greatest of prose stylists.