Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Michael Scammell

Luzhin's prodigious talent at chess earns him the title of grandmaster, but his passion soon leads to obsession, and his world falls apart during a championship match when his defense fades under his opponent's surprising strategy.

A Novel

The Defense

Best known as the author of the classic Darkness at Noon, Koestler was one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals, involved in and commenting on almost every political movement of the twentieth century. As young man, he was a committed Zionist and moved to Palestine; he was imprisoned and sentenced to death in Franco's Spain; escaped Occupied France; and was a member of the Communist party for seven years, later becoming one of its fiercest critics with the publication of Darkness at Noon. Without sentimentality, Scammell gives a full account of Koestler's turbulent private life: his drug use, manic depression, the frenetic womanizing that doomed his three marriages and led to an accusation of rape, and his startling suicide pact with his wife in 1983. Koestler also gives a full account of the author's voluminous writings, making the case that the autobiographies and essays are fit to stand beside Darkness at Noon as works of lasting literary value. Michael Scammell creates an indelible portrait of this brilliant, unpredictable, and talented writer, once memorably described as "one third blackguard, one third lunatic, and one third genius."

The Indispensable Intellectual

Koestler

The Gift

Защита Лужина. The Defence ... Translated by Michael Scammell in Collaboration with the Author

This book, first published in 1984, was the first full biography of Solzhenitsyn. Starting with his childhood, it covers every period of his life in considerable detail, showing how Solzhenitsyn’s development paralleled and mirrored the development of Soviet society: ambitious and idealistic in the twenties and thirties, preoccupied with the struggle for survival in the forties, hopeful in the fifties and sixties and disillusioned in the seventies. Solzhenitsyn’s life thus serves as a paradigm for the history of twentieth-century Communism and for the intelligentsia’s attitudes to Communism. At the same time, this book relates Solzhenitsyn’s life to his works, all of which contain a large element of autobiography.

Michael Scammell

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