Michael Rodgers' (Honorary Associate and Associate Lecturer in English, FASS) monograph, Nabokov and Nietzsche: Problems and Perspectives, has been awarded The Jane Grayson Prize by the International Vladimir Nabokov Society for a first book of 2018 that makes a significant contribution to Nabokov studies. The prize comes with a $1500 award.

The judges write: ‘Like many Russian writers during the Silver Age, Nabokov was familiar with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Rather than providing a traditional study of influence, however, Rodgers uses Nietzschean themes that surface in Nabokov’s work—including eternal recurrence, amor fati, master-slave morality, the Übermensch, and productive experiences of moral disorientation and perspectivism (which demands individuals’ active engagement with truth) — to examine, often with insight and subtlety, problems in interpreting the author and his writing that have haunted Nabokov studies for decades.'

Nabokov and Nietzsche: Problems and Perspectives addresses the many knotted issues in the work of Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita's moral stance, Pnin's relationship with memory, Pale Fire's ambiguous internal authorship – that often frustrate interpretation. It does so by arguing that the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, as both a conceptual instrument and a largely unnoticed influence on Nabokov himself, can help to untie some of these knots.

The study addresses the fundamental problems in Nabokov's writing that make his work perplexing, mysterious and frequently uneasy rather than simply focusing on the literary puzzles and games that, although inherent, do not necessarily define his body of work. Michael Rodgers shows that Nietzsche's philosophy provides new, but not always palatable, perspectives in order to negotiate interpretative impasses, and that the uneasy aspects of Nabokov's work offer the reader manifold rewards.