substantiation, surmising that Nabokov must have been thrilled by Nietzsche through his proxy readings of Andrei Belyi's Petersburg (1913), Maksimilian Voloshin, Adelaida Gertsyk, or Iulii Aikhenvald. Karshan does not produce hard proof of this, however, and has to resort to cautious formulae ("From Voloshin and Bely, Nabokov will have had ample opportunities to learn about.. . Nietzsche's ideas," 40; "It is easy to imagine how enticing such comments would have been to an ambitious young writer like Nabokov," 41; "Nabokov would have learned from Bely a great deal about Kant's and Nietzsche's aesthetics," 44, and so on). The most direct reference to Nietzsche's work is found, in fact, in Nabokov's novel The Gift (1938), written in Germany. Although the latter abounds with allusions to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, most of them still remain unidentified and understudied. Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) is another prominent philosopher who could supply Karshan many interesting points of intersection with Nabokov's philosophy of play. Nabokov had read Spengler and critiqued him in one of his early papers, as well as later in The Gift (Yasha Chernyshevski is said to be obsessed by the author of Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918, 1923, as most of Nabokov's emigre contemporaries were). The chapters of Karshan's book entitled "Divine Games" and "Cards and Chess" deal with early manifestations of sports in Nabokov's writings, as well as with his possible dialogue with other modern authors, like Lewis Carroll and Osip Mandel'shtam (Karshan misreads Mandel'shtarn's poem "Football," 1913-contrary to his assertion, a mob does not play "football with a decapitated head," 63, in this poem, which only evokes parallels to a beheading of Holofernes by the Biblical Judith in the context of an impending world war). The fourth chapter, "A Praise of Idleness?" discusses the next phase in Nabokov's evolution of interest in games. Adding Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka to his analysis of idleness in Nabokov's mature novels, Karshan aptly notes that "all his favourite modernist novels resist work" (119). In the following chapter, the audior transitions to a discussion of yet another aspect of his complex research, which he calls "free play," meaning play without rules ("Free Play and Childhood from The Gift to Ada"). The sixth and last chapter of Karshan's book, "PaleFire and the Genre of die Literary Game," offers a number of originally refreshing readings of the late Nabokov's masterpiece. An especially interesting discussion ensues when Karshan collates Viktor Shklovskii's 1923 essay on Aleksandr Pushkin and Laurence Sterne with Nabokov's 1962 novel. According to Karshan, Shklovskii's treatment of Eugene Onegin (1825-32) "offers a manual for Nabokov's parodic procedures in Pale Fire" (209), and corroborates his findings with relevant copied sentences from Shklovskii's sources in Nabokov's notes kept in the Berg Collection. The definite strength of the book under review is that Karshan draws in detail on Nabokov's un-translated ear...
