Poems

This edition reproduces the final collection of Russian poems by Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), written between 1917 and 1974. The preliminary selection of works was made by the writer himself in the last years of his life. After his death, his wife Vera continued working on the collection, writing a foreword in which she pointed out the "main theme of Nabokov." "Poems" introduces the reader to the most controversial and dramatic section of the multifaceted Nabokovian art and includes a number of works published for the first time, as well as late notes by Nabokov. "It is not methods and not schools that animate poetry," noted the leading émigré critic G. Adamovich, who called Nabokov a "born poet," "but the inner energy seeking an outlet: only the deaf will not hear it in Nabokov." The edition is supplied with editor's comments and an appendix, in which Nabokov's preface to his last lifetime poetry collection "Poems and Tasks" (1970) is published for the first time in Russian translation.