Thomas Karshan

Thomas Karshan argues that play is Nabokov's signature theme, and that Nabokov's novels form one of the most sophisticated treatments of play ever achieved. He traces the idea of art as play back to German aesthetics, and shows how Nabokov's aesthetic outlook was formed by various Russian migr toon meer writers who espoused those aesthetics. Karshan then follows Nabokov's exploration of play as subject and style through his whole oeuvre, outlining the relation of play to other important themes such as faith, make-believe, violence, freedom, order, work, Marxism, desire, childhood, art, and scholarship. As he does so, he demonstrates a series of new literary sources, contexts, and parallels for Nabokov's work in writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Bely, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, Pope, and the humanist tradition of the literary game. Thomas Karshan is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at QueenMary, University of London. toon minder