Poems and Problems. New York, 1970

Poems and Problems includes thirty-nine of Nabokov's Russian poems with English translations printed on facing pages at his insistence; fourteen English poems, all of which had appeared in Doubleday's 1959 edition of Poems; and eighteen chess problems, with solutions.

In his foreword, Nabokov contends that his Russian verse is far superior to his poetry in English: "Somehow, [the English poems] are of a lighter texture than the Russian stuff, owing, no doubt, to their lacking that inner verbal association with old perplexities and constant worry of thought which marks poems written in one's mother tongue, with exile keeping up its parallel murmur and a never-resolved childhood plucking at one's rustiest chords." Some critics offer a different, possibly less biased, view, claiming that by the time Nabokov was writing poetry in English, he had fine-tuned his craft substantially.

He had been composing chess problems since his late teens, and published nearly three dozen throughout his life - though his American years saw a hiatus from publishing, if not composing, problems. Janet Gezari, in a survey of Nabokov's works, reveals that "Nabokov's heroes include a chess grandmaster . . . and a chess problem composer . . .; chess games occur in several of the novels; and chess and chess problem language and imagery regularly put his readers' chess knowledge to the test." Among Nabokov's credentials are his published problems, and an invitation to join the American team in 1970 to compose chess problems for international competitions. The problem that appears in Speak, Memory, supposedly composed during his last night in Paris before emigrating to the United States (though this point has been disputed), was also published in Chess Problems: Introduction to an Art (London, 1963).

The items listed below pertain to Nabokov's life and career and are the contents of the exhibition at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, on view from April 23 through August 21, 1999. This checklist, primarily of items from the Library's Nabokov Archive, is included here to provide a sense of the rich holdings in this special collection.

Vladimir Nabokov
Poems
Drawings by Robin Jacques
Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1959
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov
Poesie
Translated by Alberto Pescetto and Enzo Siciliano
Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1962
Inscribed on the front endpaper to Véra, and signed in full by "V. Nabokov," with two of his pseudonyms added: "V. Sirin" and "Basilio Siskov"
Courtesy of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc.

Vladimir Nabokov
"A Room"
Holograph draft on index card, dated Ithaca, 1950
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov
"Poems and Problems"
Carbon typescript with Nabokov's holograph corrections, dated December 1969
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov
"On Translating 'Eugene Onegin' "
Setting copy of the poem from Poesie (1962)
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov
"And when the tawny woods"
Holograph draft of unpublished poem, 1968-69?
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov
Poems and Problems
New York: McGraw-Hill, [1970]
Nabokov's copy, with his holograph corrections
Berg Collection

British Chess Federation
Awards in Problem Tourneys (Nos. 137, 138, 1974-75), February 1976
Nabokov's copy, with his holograph annotations
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov's magnetic chess set, with holograph markings for chess positions, ca. 1960
Lent by Dmitri Nabokov