Vladimir Nabokov Books in Order

In a shabby Berlin boardinghouse, émigré Ganin discovers that his neighbour's absent wife is Mary, his first love from pre-revolutionary Russia, and becomes consumed by memories and a plan to meet her, forcing him to choose between idealised past and uncertain present.

Naive young Franz joins his wealthy uncle Dreyer's household in Berlin and soon becomes the lover and pawn of Dreyer's restless wife Martha, who begins plotting a clumsy murder amid department store intrigues, mannequin schemes, and farcical misunderstandings.

An awkward, isolated boy grows into a world-famous chess grandmaster whose life becomes indistinguishable from the game, as obsessive calculation and pressure push Luzhin toward a mental collapse that his adoring but helpless wife cannot prevent.

After a beating and apparent suicide attempt, the narrator seems to exist only as an observing 'eye', watching fellow Russian émigrés discuss a man named Smurov and discovering how other people's stories can create, distort, or erase a self.

Martin Edelweiss, a young Russian émigré, drifts through boarding schools, Cambridge, and European travels, nursing an unrequited love and finally seeking a dangerous secret return to Soviet Russia in a quixotic quest for meaning and courage.

Albert Albinus, a prosperous Berlin art critic, abandons his family for Margot, a teenage usherette and would-be actress, only to be blinded and cruelly exploited by her and her lover in a relentless tale of lust, betrayal, and humiliation.

Hermann, a chocolate factory owner convinced he has found his exact double in a down-and-out tramp, devises what he believes is the perfect murder and insurance scam, narrating his own scheme in a way that steadily exposes his vanity and self-deception.

Cincinnatus C, imprisoned in a surreal totalitarian state for the vague crime of 'gnostical turpitude', waits for an unnamed execution date while trying to write and to locate a more authentic inner reality than the flimsy world around him.

Set among Russian émigrés in 1920s Berlin, this richly layered novel traces young writer Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev as he recalls his explorer father, falls in love, and composes a scandalous biography, blending parody, autobiography, and a portrait of artistic growth.

Written in Russian in 1939, this brief, disturbing novella follows a middle-aged man who marries a widow solely to gain access to her young daughter, sketching the obsessive fantasies and moral collapse that anticipate themes later expanded in Lolita.

After the death of his half brother, a Russian born English novelist, the narrator V sets out to write Sebastian Knight's biography, interviewing friends and lovers and discovering how easily facts blur into fiction and self-projection.

This short critical study explores the life and work of Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, from The Overcoat and Dead Souls to his religious crises, highlighting the bizarre humour, grotesque images, and technical daring that shaped modern Russian prose.

In a grim, invented European state ruled by the Party of the Average Man, philosopher Adam Krug resists a brutish new regime that tries to coerce his support, turning his grief and moral refusal into a bleak, nightmarish fable about totalitarianism.

Nabokov's memoir revisits his aristocratic Russian childhood, family estates, first love, exile, Cambridge years, and early writing life, arranging memories as intricate motifs that link butterflies, games, and loss across time.

Told by the self-justifying professor Humbert Humbert, this novel follows his grooming, abduction, and sexual abuse of twelve-year-old Dolores Haze during a road trip across America, exposing how language and charm can mask violence, self-delusion, and a child's suffering.

Timofey Pnin, a hapless but dignified Russian professor in small-town America, stumbles through mispronounced lectures, housing mishaps, and academic politics, while the sly narrator alternates between gently mocking and quietly honouring his stubborn decency.

Presented as a 999-line poem by John Shade plus a sprawling commentary by his deranged neighbour Charles Kinbote, this novel lets footnotes, fantasies, and literary puzzles slowly reveal competing stories of grief, exile, and possible delusion.

Told as the memoir of Van Veen, this sprawling family chronicle on an alternate Earth traces his lifelong, taboo love affair with his sister Ada, weaving together romance, mock science, philosophy, and elaborate wordplay over decades.

Hugh Person, a timid American editor, revisits a Swiss town four times across his life, falling in love, marrying, and stumbling toward tragedy as unseen narrators peel back "transparent" layers of objects and memories to show how the past haunts the present.

Thirteen stories written in Russian between the late 1920s and 1940 portray émigré lives, doomed romances, fantastical journeys, and sudden shifts of reality, offering a compact tour of Nabokov's early themes and narrative tricks.

Collected interviews, essays, letters, and short pieces capture Nabokov sounding off on literature, politics, translation, censorship, language, and butterflies, revealing both his sharp intolerance for clichés and his precise ideas about how fiction should work.

An aging Russian émigré novelist named Vadim narrates a wildly unreliable autobiography that mirrors and distorts Nabokov's own life, turning failed marriages, shifting identities, and literary games into a darkly comic puzzle about memory and self-invention.

This collection gathers thirteen tales, mostly from Nabokov's Berlin and Paris years, ranging from political allegories of dictatorship to uncanny ghostly pieces and intricate character studies, culminating in the haunting English story The Vane Sisters.

Early émigré stories set in Berlin and elsewhere dwell on small sensory details, chance encounters, and sudden blows of fate, hinting at the preoccupations with memory, illusion, and pattern that would later shape Nabokov's novels.

Here Nabokov dissects European and American novels from Austen, Flaubert, Dickens, Kafka, Proust, Joyce, and others, showing how he mapped plots, drew diagrams, and taught students to read slowly, noticing patterns rather than searching for simple messages.

This slim volume extracts Nabokov's extended classroom commentary on James Joyce's Ulysses, offering scene-by-scene guidance through Dublin's streets, Homeric echoes, and the novel's shifting styles for readers tackling Joyce's modernist epic.

Drawn from his celebrated courses, these lectures guide readers through nineteenth-century Russian masters such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, Gorky, and Chekhov, emphasising close attention to style, structure, and the concrete details of each scene.

Based on his Harvard course, this book presents Nabokov's close, sometimes prickly reading of Cervantes, tracing Don Quixote's journeys chapter by chapter while probing questions of cruelty, narrative structure, and what makes a classic endure.

Bringing together four of Nabokov's Russian-language dramas, including The Pole and The Man from the USSR, this volume showcases his rarely seen work for the stage, where exile, historical catastrophe, and theatrical artifice collide.

Covering his American and Swiss years, these letters to editors, translators, friends, and family reveal Nabokov negotiating publishers, defending his artistic choices, discussing politics and butterflies, and struggling to shepherd Lolita into print.

A single-volume collection of nearly all Nabokov's short fiction, from early Russian tales to late English pieces, showcasing his gift for compressed storytelling, intricate wordplay, and abrupt shifts between whimsy, melancholy, and flashes of cruelty.

An expansive anthology of Nabokov's writings on butterflies, from field notes and scientific articles to letters, poems, and fiction excerpts, interleaved with commentary that traces how lepidoptery shaped both his scientific career and his literary imagination.

Left unfinished at Nabokov's death, this fragmentary novel follows a self-destructive writer obsessed with a young woman named Flora and with the idea of erasing himself, offering tantalising glimpses of late-style brilliance alongside Nabokov's handwritten index cards.

Arranged roughly in order of composition, this edition of Nabokov's sixty-five short stories lets readers watch his development from early Russian sketches to sophisticated English pieces, blending fairy-tale motifs, puzzles, melancholy, and flashes of absurd comedy.

Covering six decades of work, this selection gathers Nabokov's Russian and English poems, from early lyric pieces to later narrative works, revealing recurring obsessions with exile, lost time, language, love, and of course butterflies.

This early verse drama follows Morn, a masked king whose secret affair with Midia, the wife of a revolutionary, sets off a duel, abdication, and political upheaval in a nameless European kingdom, mixing Shakespearean rhetoric with reflections on power and desire.

These letters to his wife Vera form an intimate chronicle of their marriage, from courtship in 1920s Europe through exile and fame, mixing playful love notes with glimpses of daily work on novels, lectures, and butterfly hunts.

Centred on Nabokov's 1960s experiment recording his dreams to test a theory of precognitive dreaming, this book reproduces his dream notes and commentary, linking them to scenes from his fiction and revealing his fascination with time, memory, and chance.

Nabokov's final short story centres on Lance, a young American who volunteers for a perilous interplanetary mission, while his parents wrestle with pride and terror at home, blending science-fiction motifs with metaphysical hints and piercing family tenderness.

Gathering essays, reviews, interviews, and letters to the editor, this volume traces Nabokov's opinions on literature, politics, translation, butterflies, and his own novels, offering a candid, sometimes combative self-portrait across five decades.