Hrdinský čin – Nabokov Vladimir (2021)

Heroic Deed is the author's early novel from 1932, which is often considered a fictional counterpart to the autobiography Speak, Memory. Just like Nabokov himself, his hero is a Russian émigré who studied in Cambridge in his youth and lived in Berlin. Just as Edelweiss struggles with his self-destructive, nostalgic longing for the past, Nabokov engages in a dramatic and effective game with the expressive possibilities of the Russian language, which can be fully appreciated thanks to Pavel Dominik's translation. "A high-altitude tourist climbing Escher's staircases, pressing against the rock wall high above the abyss." This is how Jan Němec characterizes the protagonist of Nabokov's first novel being published in Czech for the first time in the afterword. Intense romantic sentiment and burning passion intertwine here in sentences that resemble climbing plants, with motifs stemming from the tension between the imagination and the reality of the book's protagonist, Martin Edelweiss. His 'heroic deed' is the only possible, albeit seemingly ironic, culmination of the inner struggle to affirm one's own identity.