Books by Leona Toker

Devoted to the ways in which Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, Leona Toker shows how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other.

Vladimir Nabokov described the literature course he taught at Cornell as "e;a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures."e; Leona Toker here pursues a similar investigation of the enigmatic structures of Nabokov's own fiction. According to Toker, most previous critics stressed either Nabokov's concern with form or the humanistic side of his works, but rarely if ever the two together. In sensitive and revealing readings of ten novels, Toker demonstrates that the need to reconcile the human element with aesthetic or metaphysical pursuits is a constant theme of Nabokov's and that the tension between technique and content is itself a key to his fiction. Written with verve and precision, Toker's book begins with Pnin and follows the circular pattern that is one of her subject's own favored devices.

Using novels by Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Conrad, Forster, and Faulkner, Toker demonstrates how the withholding of information affects readers' attitudes, stimulates their reassessment, and leads to a self-critical reorientation -- and how such manipulation of attention has specific ethical and aesthetic significance.

Reflects on the writings and testimonies that shed light on the veiled aspects of totalitarianism, dehumanisation, and atrocity. Identifying key themes that recur in the narratives - arrest, the stages of trial, imprisonment, escape, and more - the author discusses the historical, political, and social contexts of accounts of the Gulag experience.