Nabokov’s Secret Trees

“Stephen Blackwell is one of our most knowledgeable Nabokov scholars and one of our most subtle and perceptive Nabokov thinkers. With a deft touch he brings together the world of the empirical naturalist Nabokov with the world of the hyper stylist and aesthetic magician Nabokov. This study of how trees are ‘alive’ in Nabokov's thinking across a range of his published writings and into the archives is just such a work.” David Bethea, Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“Nabokov’s Secret Trees makes a fundamentally new contribution to the study of Vladimir Nabokov, profoundly changing how scholars approach him. Stephen H. Blackwell writes elegantly without jargon and offers frequently brilliant interpretations of individual works to establish a new personal mythology that serves as a metaphysical baseline for reading Nabokov's texts. This is an amazingly clever and erudite work!” Eric Naiman, Professor of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley

“Reading this imaginative, interesting, thoroughly researched book by a major Nabokov scholar is like observing the fascinating patterns of dappled light and shadow cast by a great tree in leaf, one of the writer’s favourite leitmotifs. If you have never thought about Nabokov and trees before, you will now. Nabokov’s Secret Trees explores an important subject – how Nabokov perceives aspects of the natural world and depicts them in his own invented landscapes – with insight, wit, and zest.” Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities, College of the Holy Cross