Plays

Nabokov's rapturous masterpiece of erotic obsession entered the common consciousness and inspired two films. It also inspired Nabokov himself to try his hand at screenwriting, and the result was this typically graceful and ingenious screenplay, which he wrote in 1960. Lolita: A Screenplay gleefully demolishes a host of stereotypes - sexual, moral and aesthetic. The notion that cinema and literature are two separate spheres is dismantled as Nabokov marries the structural and narrative felicities of great film and prose to create a work that will delight cineophiles and Nabokovians alike. Nabokov's first major work and his only play, The Tragedy of Mister Morn is a moving study of the elusiveness of happiness, the power of imagination and the eternal battle between truth and fantasy. In this astonishingly precocious work, we see for the first time the major themes of this great writer: intense sexual desire and jealousy, precarious make-believe, glittering happiness and abject despair. Part of a major new beautiful hardback series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author of Pnin and Pale Fire, in Penguin Classics.