Amherst Center for Russian Culture Book Launch: Luke Parker, "Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile"

Join us for a discussion of Professor Luke Parker's new book, Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile, with Roman Utkin (Wesleyan University) and Lilya Kaganovsky (UCLA).

Nabokov Noir places Vladimir Nabokov's early literary career-- from the 1920s to the 1940s --in the context of his fascination with silent and early sound cinema and the chiaroscuro darkness and artificial brightness of the Weimar era, with its movie palaces, cultural Americanism and surface culture. Luke Parker argues that Nabokov's engagement with the cinema and the dynamics of mass culture more broadly is an art of exile, understood both as literary poetics and practical strategy.