Vladimir Nabokov
About the Gabriel Matzneff affair and pedophilia in French culture and society from the 1950s to the present day. "It was not very difficult to know who Matzneff was at the time." Vanessa Springora denounces thus, in an interview with the Parisian , the support which benefited the writer Gabriel Matzneff , in the years 1970 and 1980. The author fifties then maintains an affair with the young girl, aged 14 years. A relationship under control that the editor tells in Le Consentement (éd. Grasset), published Thursday. "After having analyzed the work " , the Paris public prosecutor's office announced Friday January 3 the opening of an investigation for "rapes committed on the person of a minor of 15 years".
In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of seriocomic Russian émigrés, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair. His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia. In stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin's, who, he discovers, is Mary's husband, temporarily separated from her by the Revolution but expecting her imminent arrival from Russia.
Based upon the novel by Vladimir Nabokov, a chess grandmaster travels to Italy in the 1920s to play in a tournament and falls in love.
Follows an extraordinary weekend in the not-so-extraordinary life of Jinho. The story unravels around the fatalistic pattern of our meek hero's existence-where a chance meeting with the devil offers Jinho an escape hatch to his daily humdrum, and a shot at his greatest fantasy: a night of unbridled passion with all the women of his choosing as his personal sex slaves. Jinho's shy and idiosyncratic character, however, belie the true greed and foolery of his own desires-and steeped in his "Sysphus-esque" lack of self-knowledge, he falls prey to the glitter of the forbidden fruit.
About a young boy growing up to become a great artist. Set basically in St. Petersburg and a country dacha in Vyra during the aftermath of the 1905 Russian Revolution.
Germany in the early 1930s. Against the backdrop of the Nazis' rise, Hermann Hermann, a Russian émigré and chocolate magnate, goes slowly mad. It begins with his seating himself in a chair to observe himself making love to his wife, Lydia, a zaftig empty-headed siren who is also sleeping with her cousin. Hermann is soon given to intemperate outbursts at his workers, other businessmen, and strangers. Then, he meets Felix, an itinerant laborer, whom he delusionally believes looks exactly like himself. Armed with a new life insurance policy, he hatches an elaborate plot in the belief it will free him of all his worries.
Cincinnatus C., a thirty-year-old teacher, has been found guilty of the crime "gnostical turpitude", and will be executed in twenty days time.
In a fictitious European city known as Padukgrad, where a government arises following the rise of a philosophy known as "Ekwilism", which discourages the idea of anyone being different from anyone else, and promotes the state as the prominent good in society.
Swinging London in the 1960's. Deals with the affection of a middle-aged man for a very young woman, resulting in a mutually parasitic relationship.
