Have you gotten a hold of Verses and Versions yet? Do. It’s a tour and a tour-de-force, Nabokov-style. It’s an enriching stroll through another one of those literary gardens that Nabokov was always taking us on: Eugene Onegin, The Song of Igor’s Campaign, A Hero of Our Time, the lectures. I often feel that, right up there with his sense of form and his use of language was his intense desire to share with us what he loved so much, literature—and in particular, Russian literature. He was a teacher. And isn’t every great artist?

Verses and Versions, Harcourt, 2008

Excuse me. The point of this posting isn’t to wax eloquent over VN’s writing but to let you know a few things about V&V, bibliographically speaking. By my count, it contains 172 Nabokov works (with five more works embedded inside of those 172) going back to 1929: mostly translations—some of whole works, many of parts of works—but also essays, notes, poems, and criticism. A great number of the pieces are extractions from the original and the revised editions of Eugene Onegin. The notes at the back are extremely useful for tracking down the origins of the works.

The book is fully 480 pages long. It is very attractively designed with a recurring graphic on the dust jacket, facing the title-page, on section pages, and on a few other pages. I think that it is called an arabesque. But I’m not sure. Does anyone know?