Vladimir Nabokovās āWestern choiceāāhis exile to the West after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolutionāallowed him to take a crucial literary journey, leaving the closed nineteenth-century Russian culture behind and arriving in the extreme openness of twentieth-century America. InĀ Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics, Nina L. Khrushcheva offers the novel hypothesis that because of this journey, the works of Russian-turned-American Vladimir Nabokov (1899ā1977) are highly relevant to the political transformation under way in Russia today. Khrushcheva, a Russian living in America, finds in Nabokovās novels a useful guide for Russiaās integration into the globalized world. Now one of Nabokovās āWesternā characters herself, she discusses the cultural and social realities of contemporary Russia that he foresaw a half-century earlier.
InĀ Pale Fire;Ā Ada, or Ardor; Pnin;Ā and other works, Nabokov reinterpreted the traditions of Russian fiction, shifting emphasis from personal misery and communal life to the notion of forging oneās own āhappyā destiny. In the twenty-first century Russia faces a similar challenge, Khrushcheva contends, and Nabokovās work reveals how skills may be acquired to cope with the advent of democracy, capitalism, and open borders.