Poems

This edition reproduces the final collection of Russian poems by Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), written between 1917 and 1974. The preliminary selection of works was made by the writer himself in the last years of his life. After his death, his wife Vera continued to work on the collection, writing an introduction in which she pointed out "Nabokov's main theme." "Poems" acquaints the reader with the most contradictory and dramatic section of Nabokov's multifaceted art and includes a number of works published for the first time in it, as well as Nabokov's late notes. "It is not methods or schools that animate poetry," noted the leading emigrant critic G. Adamovich, calling Nabokov a "born poet," "but the inner energy seeking an outlet: only the deaf will not hear it in Nabokov." The edition is supplemented with editor's comments and an appendix, which includes for the first time in Russian translation Nabokov's introduction to his last poetic collection "Poems and Tasks" (1970).