In March of 1964, Vladimir Nabokov returned to New York for the publication of his translation of Eugene Onegin. On April 5th, he read at the Poetry Center for the first (and last) time. Though his Eugene Onegin was forthcoming, he did not read Pushkin. Instead, he read a poem called “A Lecture on Russian Poetry” and verse by Humbert Humbert and John Shade. There is also a prose selection from Pale Fire, which he introduces like this:

“For those who committed the grave mistake of not reading my novel, I should add that both my poet and my speaker are invented characters.”

Before taking the stage, Nabokov himself was introduced by Susan Sontag, who praised his work as a “literature in which ideas have been completely transformed into stylistic beauty, into elegance, into sensuousness.”

Today’s recording is an excerpt from Vladimir Nabokov’s reading here at the Poetry Center on April 5, 1964. It was the second-to-last public reading he would ever give.

When he died in 1977, Nabokov left behind the fragments of an unfinished novel on 138 hand-written note-cards—The Original of Laura. In an interview with The New York Times from October of 1976, he spoke of how Laura had kept him company during a recent illness, how he would read it aloud to “a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long-dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible.”

After decades of deliberation, his son Dmitri has now decided to have the note-cards compiled as a book under Nabokov's original title. And on Monday night, upon Laura’s publication, the Poetry Center will host A Celebration of Nabokov, with appearances by Martin Amis, Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd and Chip Kidd, the book’s designer. To purchase tickets, please click here. For more information about the rest of the upcoming season, please click here.

(Please note: a dozen of Nabokov’s note-cards will be on public display for the first time at the Celebration, courtesy of Christie's auction house, and only ticket-holders will gain access to this special one-night-only exhibit, which will open at 6:30pm.)

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of recordings from our archive. For access to other recordings from the Poetry Center archive, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

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