Adopting the modernist master Vladimir Nabokov as its guide, Nabokov in
Motion: Modernity and Movement is an exploration of the radically
changing social, historical, technological, and literary culture of the
early 20th century, a time when modes of communication and
transportation, especially, were changing society in drastic and
profound ways.
Across seventy microchapters that are by turn serious, ironic,
informative, and playful, and which take on topics such as automobiles,
trains, airplanes, electricity, elevators, advertisements, telegraphs,
and telephones, Yuri Leving offers new ways to understand Nabokov,
Russian literature, and technology, modernism, and world material
culture. Nabokov's writings are analyzed against a broad context of
prose and poetry and from the point of view of what Leving calls the
poetics of urbanism in literature.
Nabokov in Motion is a ground-breaking exploration of urban and
material themes in literature and creates a complex and vibrant cultural
fabric of which Nabokov is the master weaver.