A new book by Yuri Leving
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A new book by USC doctoral candidate Yuri Leving, who will be joining the faculty of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in September 2006.
Train Station – Garage – Hangar: Vladimir Nabokov and Poetics of Russian Urbanism
Publisher:St.
Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh Publishing
House, 400 pp., illustrations, cloth, 2004. ISBN: 5-89059-057-X.
This publication was supported by the Department of Slavic Languages.
Yuri Leving’s book Train Station – Garage – Hangar: Vladimir Nabokov and Poetics of Russian Urbanism, explores the poetics of movement and urban space in the oeuvre of the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov’s works are examined from the specific point of view of poetics of urbanism, a phenomenon that the author examines within the context of Russian and European literature of the XIX – beginning of the XX century. The book encompasses a broad territory of literary modernism, exploring three major motifs: train, automobile, and plane. Nabokov's corpus is taken as the culmination of these motifs; although Nabokov was not the last to use them, and may not even have carried them as far as some other writers, they found profound artistic embodiment in his work.
The work utilizes a substantial archival material and is richly illustrated. The rare photographs from private Nabokov family archive are published by courtesy of Mr. Dmitri Nabokov.
Focused on Russian literature, Yuri Leving’s book is not limited to it. Train Station – Garage – Hangar offers a kind of cultural thesaurus of modern technology as reflected in literature.