Nabokrossvords

Vladimir Nabokov, who rose to international renown as the author of Lolita, also held another, less well known claim to fame: he was the first to introduce crossword puzzles to the Russian-speaking world. As a young exile in Berlin, he earned a precarious living publishing anagrams, chess problems, and word games--"krossvords"--in the pages of the emigre newspaper Rul'. Collected here are 35 puzzles from Rul', together with translations and detailed annotations that offer a window onto the vanished world of Russian emigre life in the decade that followed the Bolshevik revolution. Nabokov's later masterpieces would be renowned for their wordplay, artifice, and intricate verbal patterning; in this simple krossvords, one is given an intriguing glimpse of that genius in the making.