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Invitation to a Beheading audiobook cover art

  • Invitation to a Beheading

  • By: Vladimir Nabokov
  • Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
  • Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars 111
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Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition.

  • 4 out of 5 stars

  • Nabokov's Strange Violin Playing in the Void

  • By Darwin8u on 10-28-12
Speak Memory audiobook cover art

  • Speak Memory

  • An Autobiography Revisited
  • By: Vladimir Nabokov
  • Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
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  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars 318
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    4 out of 5 stars 273
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    4 out of 5 stars 275

Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.

  • 5 out of 5 stars

  • Fabulous lines!

  • By Chrissie on 08-14-13
Pale Fire audiobook cover art

  • Pale Fire

  • By: Vladimir Nabokov
  • Narrated by: Marc Vietor, Robert Blumenfeld
  • Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars 319
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars 268
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars 269

A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life. 

  • 5 out of 5 stars

  • An amazing feat for such a unique novel

  • By AmazonCustomer on 03-27-12
The Luzhin Defense audiobook cover art

  • The Luzhin Defense

  • By: Vladimir Nabokov
  • Narrated by: Mel Foster
  • Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars 48
  • Performance
    3.5 out of 5 stars 38
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars 38

Nabokov’s third novel, The Luzhin Defense, is a chilling story of obsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen — an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster — but at a cost: in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality.

  • 4 out of 5 stars

  • Life and chess are such lonely battles

  • By Darwin8u on 11-13-12
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov audiobook cover art

  • The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

  • By: Vladimir Nabokov
  • Narrated by: Arthur Morey
  • Length: 31 hrs and 43 mins
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars 78
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars 55
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars 55

From Vladimir Nabokov, the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and the 1950s, these 68 tales — 14 of which have been translated into English for the first time - display all the shades of Nabokov’s imagination.

  • 3 out of 5 stars

  • No discernable beginning or end to the stories.

  • By Madelaine on 01-22-12
Ada, or Ardor audiobook cover art

  • Ada, or Ardor

  • A Family Chronicle
  • By: Vladimir Nabokov
  • Narrated by: Arthur Morey
  • Length: 20 hrs and 46 mins
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars 91
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars 84
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars 84

Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

  • 5 out of 5 stars

  • Worst reading performance of all time.

  • By Brian on 11-25-14

Publisher's Summary

The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself.

One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977.
©1963 Vladimir Nabokov (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

Critic Reviews

“Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” (John Updike)

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
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  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Darwin8u
  • Mesa, AZ, United States
  • 11-30-13

A complex and rich Künstlerroman

A very Proust-inspired (memory, love, dreams, art) Nabokov. The last of his Russian novels, 'the Gift' is a complex and rich Künstlerroman and is one of those novels that makes me wish I spent more time in college studying Russian simply so I could catch the nuanced differences between the Chapters where Nabokov is mimicking Pushkin, Gogol, and other Russian novelists.

Nabokov always amazes me with his ability to provoke, entertain and awe his readers. There are some novelists where it is clear they are writing for a certain audience. Nabokov seems content just to write novels that entertain an audience of one (VN). If someone else gets his books, well, it is all just a sugary and mischievous bonus, but overall ... he'd prefer to be left alone to categorize and pin his rare butterflies and metric variations.

15 of 17 people found this review helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Simply Beautiful

Where does The Gift rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

The narrator is boring and monotonous, but the story is mindbogglingly clever and the imagery is top notch.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful