The Tragedy of Mister Morn (Vintage International)

ISBN: 0307950662

Author: Nabokov, Vladimir

Condition: New

Vladimir Nabokovs earliest major work, written when he was twenty-four, is a full-length play in verse of Shakespearean beauty and richness.The story of an incognito king whose love for the wife of a banished revolutionary brings on the chaos the king has fought to prevent, this five-act play was never published in Nabokovs lifetime and lay in manuscript until it appeared in a Russian literary journal in 1997. It is an astonishingly precocious work, in exquisite verse, touching for the first time on what would become this great writers major themes: intense sexual desire and jealousy, the elusiveness of happiness, the power of the imagination, and the eternal battle between truth and fantasy. The Tragedy of Mister Morn is Nabokovs major response to the Russian Revolution, which he had lived through, but it approaches the events of 1917 through the prism of Shakespearean tragedy.Translated by Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan