Vladimir Nabokov Books in Order

Vladimir Nabokov had two full careers - nine novels in Russian as an emigre in Berlin, writing as V. Sirin, then eight more in English in America, the second career eclipsing the first. He was also a serious lepidopterist who chased butterflies on field trips the way other writers chase deadlines, and the prose shows it: sentences built like specimen drawers. The shelf runs from the emigre novels to Lolita, the book that ended his genteel poverty and made him the most infamous stylist alive, to Pale Fire, a poem with commentary that is secretly a novel. When asked his masters he named Joyce, Proust and Kafka. This page maps both careers and marks the two peaks (1926–1974).

Where to start

Lolita (1955), the door everyone knows. Pale Fire (1962) for the masterpiece.

Does the reading order matter?

Two careers, in order. The Russian shelf: Mary (1926) is the delicate debut; The Defense (1930) is the chess novel, one of the two Russian peaks; Invitation to a Beheading (1936) is the Kafkaesque prison fantasy he wrote before he had read Kafka; The Gift (1938) is the Russian masterpiece - Berlin emigre life and a biography of Chernyshevski folded into a love story. The English shelf begins with The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). Lolita (1955) - published by Olympia Press in Paris, confiscated, then published in America in 1958, where it became the phenomenon - is the door, and still the argument. Pnin (1957) is the warm one, a refugee professor in comic despair. Pale Fire (1962) is the impossible book: a 999-line poem by a dead poet, with a foreword and commentary by a madman who is slowly revealed to be the novel. Ada, or Ardor (1969) is the vast late labyrinth; Transparent Things (1972) the slight late ghost; Look at the Harlequins! (1974) the last novel, narrated by a writer who is not quite Nabokov. Speak, Memory, the memoir, reads well anywhere. Read Lolita, then Pale Fire, then decide how deep to go

Which one is the best?

Lolita (1955); Pale Fire (1962); The Gift (1938).

Related guides

Readers finishing this shelf usually want the map next door: James Joyce books in order, Franz Kafka books in order, Marcel Proust books in order. Every guide follows the same format — the shelf, the entry point, the honest answer about order.

Make it a project

Pick a session size and let the days accumulate — at the pace our reading speed test measures, most shelves above clear in a few weeks of half-hours. Every guide on the books in order shelf follows this same format, and when a book lands, its 8-question quiz is waiting on the original book quiz.