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Thomas Karshan

Thomas Karshan is the editor of Nabokov's Collected Poems, the co-translator, with Anastasia Tolstoy, of Nabokov's Tragedy of Mister Morn, and the author of a monograph, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play. He is a Lecturer in Literature at the University of East Anglia, where he teaches, among other things, courses on nonsense and on play, and he is working on three books: an edited collection of essays on the literary essay from Montaigne to the present, a book on undelivered letters, and a survey of 100 words in modern culture, to be titled A Dictionary of Modern Life.

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On Russian Freedom
Essay

On Russian Freedom

Vladimir Nabokov and the Spirit of Play

14 January 2014

Nobokov’s thinking about absolute freedom included the notion that there could be no play without competition. It is critical to think about the lack of play induced by Putin’s “traditional Russian values.”