The Tragedy of Mister Morn

For the first time in English, Vladimir Nabokov€s earliest major work, written when he was only twenty-four: his only full-length play, introduced by Thomas Karshan and beautifully translated by Karshan and Anastasia Tolstoy.

The Tragedy of Mister Morn was written in the winter of 1923­­€“1924, when Nabokov was completely unknown. The five-act play€"the story of an incognito king whose love for the wife of a banished revolutionary brings on the chaos the king has fought to prevent€"was never published in Nabokov€s lifetime and lay in manuscript until it appeared in a Russian literary journal in 1997. It is an astonishingly precocious work, in exquisite verse, touching for the first time on what would become this great writer€s major themes: intense sexual desire and jealousy, the elusiveness of happiness, the power of the imagination, and the eternal battle between truth and fantasy. The play is Nabokov€s major response to the Russian Revolution, which he had lived through, but it approaches the events of 1917 above all through the prism of Shakespearean tragedy.