|
Afterthe1917Revolution, many eminent writers, critics, philosophers, and scholars left Russia to set down new roots in Europe. Paris, France, became the center of émigré intellectual life, although lively émigré communities existed in Berlin, Germany, and other European capitals. Bunin, Kuprin, Merezhkovsky, Zamiatin, poets Viacheslav Ivanov and Marina Tsvetaeva, and many others continued to write in the tradition in which they had begun in Russia. The most original new talent among the émigrés was poet, essayist, and novelist Vladimir Nabokov, a brilliant stylist and highly perceptive and thoughtful artist. The most important of the nine Russian novels he published while living in Berlin are Dar (1937-1938; The Gift, 1963) and Priglashenie na kazn’ (1938; Invitation to a Beheading, 1959). The Gift satirizes émigré life but more importantly explores the nature of art and the process of creation. Invitation to a Beheading is a complex, surrealistic novel that deals with the ironic oppositions between the limited consciousness of a hero and the omniscience of the author. Nabokov immigrated to the United States in 1940, where he began a new career writing in English and became an American writer of great stature.
| 
