Vladimir Nabokov: Literary Psychologist

Has Vladimir Nabokov's writing anticipated trends in modern psychology?

Vladimir Nabokov. Photograph: Yousuf Karsh

In The American Scholar, Brian Boyd asks whether Vladimir Nabokov could be our greatest literary psychologist: 'We could move in many directions, which is itself a tribute to Nabokov’s range and strengths as a psychologist: the writer as reader of others and himself, as observer and introspector; as interpreter of the psychology he knew from fiction (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce), nonfiction, and professional psychology (William James, Freud, Havelock Ellis); as psychological theorist; and as psychological “experimenter,” running thought experiments on the characters he creates and on the effects he produces in readers.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• New Nabokov editions from Penguin
• Author Insults
• Ballard: 'Freud was a born storyteller'