“Pitzer, like Nabokov, is a beautiful writer and
gimlet-eyed observer, especially about her subject…Her attention to history’s
moral components is refreshingly blunt: ‘The dead are not nameless,’ she writes
of the writers and others killed in Stalin’s Great Purge of the late 1930s.
Inviting us to reconsider Nabokov, Pitzer also introduces herself as a writer
worthy of attention.”

“Pitzer
metes out her conclusions slowly, holding us in suspense until she reveals a ‘secret
history’ hidden in each of Nabokov’s major novels—in particular Lolita and Pale Fire—typically involving a momentous tragedy like the Gulag or
the Holocaust…Without question, the horrors of the twentieth century
have always rumbled beneath the surface of Nabokov’s novels, and Pitzer’s new book is a fine guide to their
nightmarish underbelly.”

“Given how much scholarship
concerns Nabokov’s oeuvre, it is bold to contend, as Pitzer does in her
introduction, that ‘a whole layer of meaning in his work has vanished.’ That
statement had me sharpening my critical daggers. But by the end, Pitzer managed
to pretty much make her case, mostly by not belaboring the point, though also
never deviating from it.”

“Fifty years is long time to wait for a decryption device,
but one has been furnished by Andrea Pitzer, the author of The Secret
History of Vladimir Nabokov, not just one of the most beguiling literary
biographies to come out in years but also a first-rate addition to the groaning
shelf of Nabokov studies.”

“[Pitzer’s] fresh perspective will likely send
readers back to his books.”

“This is a brilliant examination that adds to
the understanding of an inspiring and enigmatic life.”