This volume is part of the Cambridge UP series “Literature in Context,” so only the first-time reader can wonder in context with what Nabokov is discussed in it. Context here covers “the social, historical, ideological and cultural context of his time” (3). This traditional approach, well backgrounded by modern theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Mikhail Lotman, and Rita Felski, defines the method and the readership. It is universal: a solid orientation for beginners like students or lay readers, a manual for graduates, and a synthesis for initiated scholars.

The thirty-one 8-10-page chapters arranged in four thematic units result in something like a third companion to Nabokov after those of Garland (ed. Vladimir Alexandrov, 1995) and of Cambridge (ed. Julian W. Connolly, 2006), sharing the same merits in comprehensiveness and typical problems of volumes with multiple authors’ different focuses (and some unavoidable overlaps). In some cases the synthesis is not based on the whole oeuvre: the authorial control is demonstrated only on three novel-examples, or authorial “masks” are disregarded.

The volume presents Nabokov mainly in Anglo-Saxon context and for English readers. Only one chapter offers further readings in four languages. Apart from it and self-/cross-references by the seven authors of Russian descent, the 11-page list of proposed readings contains only one general reference, one collective volume, one dissertation in Russian, and one book in German. The Berlin chapter is without any footnotes, in spite of the existence of a wide range of possible sources. In the whole volume, Nabokov's declarations, interviews, and biography prevail over text analysis.

Part I puts the writer's “Identity” under the magnifying glass. After two essays on Nabokov's biography chapter, “Academia” stands out with well summarized references and new aspects on the change of topic to campus life (55). The same fresh, concise logic marks the chapter “Childhood” with comments on Nabokov's relationship to the arts. “Women” has excellent observations on Zina in The Gift and on incestuous creativity in Ada. The important chapter “Friends and Foes” gently leaves accentuated the deeper layers of ambiguous relationships and serially-discarded friends.

Part II contextualizes “Places.” St Petersburg was the city of the literary predecessors while the Russian childhood, the feeling of “never-returning” is relegated to the summerhouses. Cambridge was the locus where Nabokov the writer, sportsman, and entomologist discovered these three main passions. “Proto-Nazi barbarity” infiltrated into Nabokov's texts in Berlin, where the cityscape and urban settings also influenced them. Nabokov did not adore but relied on it as a literary marketplace, preferring the French Riviera and the context of the great masters Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. “East to West Coast” masterfully takes the reader along across the US, showing the imaginary map of American mass culture and the satirical mixture of old and new mythologies. “Switzerland,” the last address of Nabokov, was also a literary scenery and a source for hybrid toponyms.

The third unit, “Literature and Arts” interrogates canon, genre, media, mode, censorship, and the contemporary critical echo. Nabokov's major Russian texts, strongly related to the “Russian literary canon” also tried to alter or refuse its standards (127). Nabokov's “Western Canon” is shown as inseparable from Russian literary canon (133), and follows the categories of pain, cruelty, and delight from Nabokov's lectures on Don Quixote to Lolita. After chapters on émigré Russian aesthetics, the political and publishing ambiance of Berlin and Paris, and American editorial practices in the growing book market, “Tamizdat and Samizdat” adventures of Nabokov's books are followed around the world. The chapter “Detective Fiction” overviews Nabokov's plots but misses Edgar Alan Poe's essays among the theoretical concepts, and one more aspect: when “chance becomes a slave to fate” (161), the fate's fate is in the author's hands. “Visual Imagination” goes in the deep of the question of medialization and cinematic strategy in Nabokov's prose. In “Popular culture” different genres of adaptation, films, music, and fashion are examined in the complex media-afterlife of Nabokov's works, especially Lolita.

The ten chapters of the last unit, “Ideas and Cultures,” embrace delicate topics and phenomena, placing the writer in the intellectual crosscurrents of his times. These include discourses he hated and mocked, subjects he embraced and represented, ideas and behaviors he followed or rejected, and historical periods that forced him to expose his ideological stance.

“Science” and art were intertwined and mutually seminal for Nabokov, a leading lepidopterist who regularly read scientific journals, including in physics and psychology. A prominent person in this productive dialogue was “Darwin,” who marked a choice between Positivism and Symbolism, materialism or spiritualization of the world. Another vulnerable reference person was Sigmund Freud, who became the target of Nabokov's hostility because of the omnipotence of psychoanalysis in America of the 1950s. His parody symptomatically confirms what is mocked (218).

“Faith” follows Nabokov's personal metaphysics, and Gnosticism and the metapoetical strategy of authorial God-like superpower. The chapter “Jewishness as a Literary Device” argues that the writer takes the position of antisemitism rather than Judeophilia, and his “Jewish Others” remained conventional and reliant on “Judeophile clichés” (229). Here the simplest solution was overlooked: Nabokov's approach to Jews was not as Others but as equal human beings; moreover, not the literary device but twentieth-century history made Jews symbols of suffering. A fine distinction is made between western and Russian “Liberalism,” explaining Nabokov's political standoff with his father's position, a liberal statesman with strong engagement. Soviet and Nazi “Totalitarianism” and dictatorship is tracked meticulously in a wide theoretical framework, an ample chronological panorama embracing oeuvre and conflicts. The chapter “Cold War” argues that Nabokov, with his lifelong anti-communism, anticipated the dominant currents of the 1950s. The “Long 1950s,” full of elucidating observations on disguised identities, could have been named “Norms” or “Norm-braking” as it deals with Nabokov's interest in pedophilia, homosexuality, incest, promiscuity, homophobia, and unstable gender roles. Nabokov's “Transnationalism” appears as a universal condition of exile, border-crossing, escape, and the polylinguistic matrix.

This is a collection of outstanding and enlightening essays by the best scholars in Nabokov studies. Editors could have provided more detailed descriptions of the contributors, adding their short biographies to the reference matter. This book functions as a scholarly hub where, similarly to computer ports, different segments of Nabokov's oeuvre are interconnected into a unified whole.