Thomas Seifrid
This important contribution to Nabokov scholarship excels as a study of the modern cultural conditions within which Nabokov's literary art evolved. Drawing on insightful readings of Nabokov's early works and impressive archival research, Luke Parker argues that cinematic culture influenced Nabokov's oeuvre and shaped his career to a far greater extent than previously understood. Nabokov is known for being self-consciously and allusively literary. Parker convincingly shows how deliberately Nabokov also processed experience through the prism of the cinema.
Lilya Kaganovsky
Wonderfully researched, Nabokov Noir gives us a real sense of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, and what Nabokov's life there might have looked like. The rich fabric of intersecting lines of inquiry and attention to street maps, journals, reviews, placement of theaters, émigré occupations, and preoccupations describe a complete world, not filled with specters or ghosts, but with real people in their historical context. Nabokov Noir goes deep into Nabokov's world but in a different way than most: it shows us the world that constructed Nabokov, rather than the other way around.
Yuri Tsivian
Nabokov Noir is an exceptional book: well written, cleverly designed, and impeccably researched. The Nabokov who emerges from these pages is a struggling Russian writer in exile, eager to inscribe his work into contemporary European literature and recognizing in the new medium of cinema a universal translator that could help him achieve his relentless pursuit of worldwide recognition.
Eric Naiman
Luke Parker's book fundamentally alters our understanding of Nabokov's literary career and his aesthetics in the period before and just after his emigration to America. In addition, it casts important new light on Russian émigré culture and shows how deeply it was embedded in the cinema of the 1920s and 30s. What is perhaps most remarkable about Nabokov Noir is that it shows how Nabokov's cinema theory and 'cinema praxis' shaped the writing and the revising of his fiction.
