 Brilliant's Audio presents the unabridged recording of Selected Poems by Vladimir Nabokov, edited and with an introduction by Thomas Karshan, new translations by Dmitry Nabokov, performed by Christopher Lane. Introduction Like Joyce, Nabokov was first a poet. It was, he tells us in his autobiography, Speak Memory, 1967, the summer of 1914, when the numb fury of verse-making first came over me. Over the next decade he composed thousands of poems, which he came years later to remember with a certain fond disgust. In the introduction to his 1970 collection Poems and Problems, he would speak of the steady mass of verse which I began to exude in my early youth, more than half a century ago, with monstrous regularity. Many, if not most, of these early poems were never published, though some did appear in his first collection, Sticky, Poems, published in 1916, while the Nabokov family was still in Russia, and a few more in 1918 in a collection which also included the poems of a school friend, Andrei Balashov. After the Revolution and the Nabokov family's emigration to Western Europe in 1919, Nabokov continued to write poetry, first as an undergraduate at Cambridge from 1919 to 1922, and then in Berlin, where he rejoined his family and entered the thriving literary culture of the Russian emigration. There he found public outlets for his verse in the Russian language press, especially the Berlin Emigre newspaper ruled, The Rutter, of which Nabokov's father was a founder-editor. In turn, thirty-six of his poems were collected into a volume entitled The Cluster in December 1922, and another one hundred fifty-six in The Imperium Path in January 1923. After 1926, when Nabokov published his first novel, Mary, he wrote markedly fewer poems, and his lyric impulse was largely channeled into his novels. After all, Nabokov ranks alongside James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Samuel Beckett as one of those great modernists who reinvented the novel as a vehicle for poetic prose. Indeed, his last and most important Russian novel, The Gift, published serially in 1937 to 1938, and in its complete form in 1952, a fiction... Sample complete. Ready to continue?