<p>Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of hiscentury, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fleeingFrance with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis. Herepeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering to writeartful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in the Englishlanguage really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so manycritics?</p><p>Using information from newly-declassified intelligence filesand recovered military history, journalist Andrea Pitzer argues that far frombeing a proponent of art for art’s sake, Vladimir Nabokov managed to hidedisturbing history in his fiction—history that has gone unnoticed for decades.Nabokov emerges as a kind of documentary conjurer, spending the most productivedecades of his career recording a saga of forgotten concentration camps andsearing bigotry, from World War I to the Gulag and the Holocaust. Lolita surrenders Humbert Humbert’ssecret identity, and reveals a Nabokov appalled by American anti-Semitism. Thelunatic narrator of <em>Pale Fire</em> recallsRussian tragedies that once haunted the world. From Tsarist courts to Nazi filmsets, from CIA front organizations to wartime Casablanca, the story ofNabokov’s family is the story of his century—and both are woven inextricablyinto his fiction. </p>