Javier Marías's Debt to Translation

Nabokov Studies 4 (1997) SVETLANA POLSKY (Gothenburg) Vladimir Nabokov's Short Story "Easter Rain" Vladimir Nabokov is known mainly as the author of many novels. However, the short story genre occupies an important position in his work. After first appearing in prose as a short story writer during the early twenties, Nabokov continued to write short stories in Russian throughout the thirties. Most of them were first published in emigrant periodicals; die author later included them in three collections: Vozvrashchenie Chorba. Rasskazy i Stikhi ("The Return of Chorb: Short Stories and Poems"), Soglyadataj ("The Eye") and Vesna ν Fial'te ("Spring in Fialta"). All in all, Nabokov wrote about sixty short stories in Russian. The short story "Paskhal'nyy dozhd'" ("Easter Rain") was printed in the Easter edition of the Berlin weekly Russkoe Ekho (The Russian Echo) on April 12, 1925.» This was the first and only time it was published. It was believed that the issue of the weekly with this short story by Nabokov had been lost (Boyd 231). "Easter Rain" also failed to survive in die archives of the author. After a long search, however, I was able to find it in a 1. "Easter Rain" was the last of four short stories published in this now rare weekly. In 1924 Russkoe Ekho published the short stories "Mest'" ["Revenge"], "Kartofel'nyy ElT ["The Potato Elf], and "Udar kryla" ["Wingstroke"]. 152 Nabokov Studies library in the former East Germany, seventy-one years after its publication. The plot of the story concerns an elderly Swiss woman named Josephine, returning to her native Lausanne after 12 years in Russia, where she served as a governess in a Russian family. Although while living in St. Petersburg Josephine had felt alone, out of place, and misunderstood, she now pines for Russia and looks back on her former life with nostalgia. The story begins on the Orthodox Holy Saturday. Josephine, who wants very much to celebrate Orthodox Easter in accordance with Russian tradition, buys a half dozen eggs, ineptly dyes them, and goes to visit a Russian family of her acquaintance with whom she hopes to celebrate the holiday. She believes she is falling ill, however, since she has a strong chül and a cough. The former governess soon realizes that her acquaintances do not want her company and are impatiently waiting for her to leave. She understands that all her efforts have been in vain: the celebrations simply failed to materialize. Back at home her condition worsens. She becomes delirious and the next morning the doctor diagnoses her with pneumonia. For five days she is on the brink of death, but on the sixth day she unexpectedly regains consciousness. Josephine returns from her delirium to this world in a completely new, joyous, and renewed state. The story ends with the laughter of the heroine, who has just regained consciousness. It is immediately apparent that the story "Easter Rain" is built on a contrast, running through the entire text, between two completely dissimilar worlds. One of these is the everyday reality in which the heroine lives. Lausanne, where Josephine is totally alone and unhappy, is presented as a boring little town tiiat is in no way remarkable, with unattractive houses and narrow streets. The description of Lausanne contains numerous nouns with diminutive and pejorative suffixes. Thus, the sun glides along the "roofs of the sloping stone hovels" [domishki] and Josephine now lives in her "native and alien little town Nabokov's Story "Easter Rain" 153 [gorodok], where it is difficult to breathe, where the houses are built haphazardly, side by side, all over the place along the steep, angular little streets [ulochki]."2 Typically, the sun does not linger in this eternally gloomy town. On the day described in tins story, "it was quiet, springlike cloudy, but by evening a heavy icy wind started blowing from the mountains." When Josephine leaves to visit her acquaintances, it is "deserted, damp, and dark" outside. In the evening she walks home "under the noisy, sobbing trees" and sees that the "sky was deep and troubled, the moon was dim and the storm clouds were like a heap of ruins." When our heroine comes around after five...

IT HAS BEEN SAID* and collected by NORMAN PASKINi "To try to map our tomorrows with the help ofdata supplied by our yesterdays means ignoring the basic element of the future which is its complete nonexistence ."—Vladimir Nabokov "Credibility is an expanding field. . . . Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight."—Tom Stoppard "Logic is a tool. . . . and a tool alone does nothing. It has to have a point of leverage and a guiding hand."—Stanislaw Lem "If anyone asks, What is culture? Who is cultured? the needle points, by an extraordinary coincidence, in the direction of ourselves."—C. P. Snow "There is great difference betwixt the being able to make experiments and the being able to give a philosophical account of them."—Robert Boyle "Happiness is a perpetual possession of being well deceived."—Jonathan Swift "Most ofhuman sentences are aimed at getting rid of the ambiguity which you unfortunately left trailing in the last sentence."—Jacob Bronowski "Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant."—Lewis Carroll " 'My project,' he told us, 'is to learn where to go by discovering where I am by reviewing where I've been.' "—John Barth "Mathematics and death are never in error."—Yvgeney Zamyatin ?Material appearing under this tide is collected with the aim of making the serious a bit less serious, the ponderous a bit less heavy, and the reading hours a bit more fun. We invite you to share a collection of your humorous treasures with PBM readers. tAddress: Backershagen 27, 1082 GR Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Perspectives in Biology andMedicine ¦ Spring 1979 | 359 "His heart and soul were at the end of his pen, and they got into the ink."— Rudyard Kipling "If a man were to rummage in his past, he'd find material in it for a whole set of lives."—Karel Capek "Ask yourself what you remember from the last articles and books you read, beyond their titles and, perhaps, an idea or two—that, and a sense of time spent in reading."—Ronald Christ "I am sorry to find you participating in the vulgar error of the reading public, to whom an unusual collocation of words, involving a juxtaposition of antiperistatical ideas, immediately suggests the notion of hyperoxysophistical paradoxology."—Thomas Love Peacock "It is venturesome to suggest that a co-ordination of words can resemble the universe very much."—Jorge Luis Borges "Philosophy has a fine saying for everything—for death it has an entire set."—Laurence Sterne "I noticed, with respect to experiments, that they became more necessary the more one is advanced in knowledge."—René Descartes "In these modern times, you are damn nothing unless you can produce statistics . Columns and columns of figures, readings and percentages. Where would we be if we couldn't produce our certified statistics?"—"Flann O'Brien" (Brian O'Nolan) "Always, in our trade, look a gift horse at both ends and in the middle. He may throw you."—Rudyard Kipling "How often language is the cloak with which a man conceals, not his thought, but his want of thought."—Robert Louis Stevenson "Nothing annoys me so much in the stupid as that they are better pleased with themselves than any reasonable person has a right to be."—Michel de Montaigne "Journalism largely consists in saying 'Lord Jones Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive."—G. K. Chesterton " 'Kismet', i.e. fate—if at all anything, and as potent as suspected for centuries—is a dam' baffling thing!"—G. V. Desani "Ifthe Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon the Creation, I should have recommended something simpler."—Alphonso X of Castile 360 Norman Paskin ¦ It Has Been Said ...

SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 748 to Zamiatin’s archives and especially his voluminous correspondence has resulted in a full, balanced and meticulously detailed account of his life and work. Of particular value to scholars of this period are accounts of Zamiatin’s friendships and collaborations with Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Fedin, Annenkov, Kustodiev, Chukovskii and many other figures in Russian modernism. The photographs and illustrations included in the book add significantly to the story Curtis tells in this volume. It is a story that expands and enriches our understanding of early twentieth-century Russian and Soviet culture as a whole. Stetson University Karen L. Ryan Morris, Paul D. Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2010. xxv + 447 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00. Vladimir Nabokov’s poetry was highly appreciated by many Russian émigré critics in the 1920s, yet only a small number of critics today believe that Nabokov’s lyric poetry matches his prose for ingenuity. In his book, Paul Morris challenges Alexander Dolinin’s opinion that ‘the verse exercises of the young Nabokov played an important role in the formation of his narrative style’ (p. 88) and aspires to demonstrate the centrality of poetry to Nabokov’s body of writing. Morris claims that ‘the lyric sensibility Nabokov developed in his verse pervades all of his writing’(p. xvii). As Morris indicates, the aim of his study is twofold: ‘to offer a comprehensive view of Nabokov’s poetry’ and to identify the role of the lyric sensibility in Nabokov’s drama, short fiction and novels (p. xvi), especially in The Gift (1937–38), in which many poems were written by that novel’s protagonist, and in Pale Fire (1962), which opens with a 999-line iambic pentameter poem in rhymed couplets. The book comprises the Introduction/chapter one that outlines the evolution of Nabokov as a poet and six chapters. Chapter two examines the reception of Nabokov’s poetry written both in Russian and in English; chapter three discusses in great detail Nabokov’s lyric voice and focuses on the presence of metaphysical traits in his poetry and identifies major themes used in his verse, including such topics as poetic inspirations, love, cosmic synchronization, encounters with the otherworld and the poeticization of everyday life; chapter four describes the lasting effect of poetry on Nabokov’s drama; chapter five explores the employment of Nabokov’s lyricism in short fiction, and chapters six and seven focus on Nabokov’s novels The Gift and Pale Fire. The strength of Morris’s study lies in its thorough investigation of Nabokov’s lyric consciousness and Morris’s awareness of its thematic and structural REVIEWS 749 complexitythatenhancesanunderstandingofthewritingsofNabokovaffected by that complexity. Yet Morris’s exploration of Nabokov’s poetic persona is far from being exhaustive. While Morris rightly detects several important allusions in Nabokov’s verse to the poetry of Keats, Blok, Fet, Tiutchev and Belyi, they are not explored in depth. The role of Nabokov’s parodies and translations of Russian poetry in the development of his narrative style is not mentioned at all. Some of Morris’s statements appear superficial and unsupported by references. For example, the statement that Nabokov’s short story ‘A Guide to Berlin’ ‘seems to be more a prose poem than a short story’ (p. 260) is not supported by any references to the tradition of prose poems as had been developed in Russia and in France. It would be appropriate at least to compare the above story to Turgenev’s prose poems which were inspired by Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose. The latter marked the beginnings of the genre in the 1860s. While Turgenev the fiction writer sought to enhance and heighten the ideas of his earlier prose narratives in his prose poems, it can be argued that the fragmentary and impressionistic style of Nabokov’s story, ‘A Guide to Berlin’, develops some of the mnemonic imagery of his verse written in emigration. Many references to Nabokov’s links with Russian Symbolism are not given adequate consideration and are mentioned in passing. A good example of lumping Nabokov together with major European and Russian poets can be...

This paper approaches the role of women, past and exile in Nabokov’s short story. First, we will understand how Vladimir Nabokov uses the female figure to stand for his lost Russia and to vent his feelings of nostalgia. Nabokov’s short stories, especially the first ones, are based on Russian expatriates’ loss and loneliness. However, the author finally changes his attitude. Then, different examples of his later production are given in which the author ironizes upon some literary motifs, especially related to female characters, in order to distance himself from his feelings of loss. We will appreciate how Nabokov uses the female figures skillfully to create problems and literary puzzles for the reader to solve in his short stories. At the end, the paper sheds light upon how the female figures are associated with problematizing literary conventions as a way of exploring different fictional possibilities in Vladimir Nabokov’s last short stories.

The article is dedicated to the problem of the influence of the American writer Ambrose Bierce on the early work of Vladimir Nabokov. This influence can be traced back to several Nabokov’s texts (“Details of A Sunset”, “The Aurelian”, “Perfection”, “The Eye”), where one can detect plot lines, motives, and images borrowed from Bierce’s paradigmatic story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” The article focuses on Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Details of A Sunset” (“Catastrophe”), where the influence of Ambrose Bierce is unquestionable. This influence was pointed out by a number of researchers, but the problem has not been thoroughly developed yet. Bierce’s influence on early Nabokov’s work is not limited to this device per se. Both authors follow the respective tradition of Early Romanticism. In both short stories the protagonists set off on a journey that is romantic in its spirit. The mystical epiphany that Nabokov’s character experiences are based on the model introduced by Bierce. Both authors employ romantic clichés, quotes from paradigmatic romantic texts and literary irony. The article also examines the system of literary images that Nabokov borrows from Bierce. It includes the image of a rope, a star, a bridge, and lightning. The parallels between the two works that are being analyzed in this article lead to a conclusion that Nabokov’s short story “Details of A Sunset” (“Catastrophe”) was directly influenced by Bierce.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), the eminent Russian-American writer and intellectual, is best known for his novels, though he was also the author of plays, poems, and short stories. In this important new work, Paul D. Morris offers a comprehensive reading of Nabokov's Russian and English poetry, until now a neglected facet of his oeuvre. Morris' unique and insightful study re-evaluates Nabokov's poetry and demonstrates that poetry was in fact central to his identity as an author and was the source of his distinctive authorial - lyric - voice. After offering a critical overview of the multi-staged history of the reception of Nabokov's poetry and an extensive analysis of his poetic writing, Morris argues that Nabokov's poetry has largely been misinterpreted and its place in his oeuvre misunderstood. Through a detailed examination of the form and content of Nabokov's writings, Morris demonstrates that Nabokov's innovations in the realms of drama, the short story, and the novel were profoundly shaped by his lyric sensibility.

Vladimir Nabokov’s musico-literary microcosm is unique because he effectively makes his literature reflect both his inability to enjoy music and his understanding of musical forms and structures. His short stories are good examples. The two early stories “Sounds” and “Music” stimulate us to imagine how he perceives sounds and music and to feel the intriguing literary world greatly influenced by his auditory experiences. The four short stories in Nabokov’s Quartet—“An Affair of Honor,” “Lik,” “The Vane Sisters,” and “The Visit to the Museum”—direct our attention not to music itself but rather to visual images of various stage performances involving music. In addition, as the title Nabokov’s Quartet implies, the four stories in it are arranged based on the author’s profound understanding of the structure and function of the musical quartet, revealing one of his ways of using music in literature and one important aspect of his musico-literary microcosm.

A Tale of Two Theories

Nabokov Studies 5 (1998/1999) SUELLEN STRINGER-HYE (Nashville) The Weed Exiles the Flower (Melville and Nabokov) Vladimir Nabokov adopted a new identity as well as a new country when he moved to America. In his mind, he soon ceased to be Sirin, the Russian poet and novelist, but was now an American writer, however unpronounceable his last name. Nabokov's vision of himself as American citizen and writer is chronicled in countless interviews and conespondence dating from 1962 until his death. "I think of myself as an American writer who has once been a Russian one."1 "I am as American as an April in Arizona."2 Commenting on the weight gained when he quit smoking, Nabokov said, "I am 1/3 American —good American flesh keeping me warm and safe."3 Never one to be taken at his word, Nabokov was, no doubt, talking about more than mid-life corpulence. Still, it has been difficult to place him in an American context. Although Leona Toker has argued Nabokov's connection to Nathaniel Hawthorne,4 many critics see him as much an abenation in the American tradition as he was in the Russian.5 Susan Elizabeth Sweeney discusses Nabokov's emotional attachment to the landscape and lepidoptera of America and, while finding temperamental affinities, does not associate him with a 1. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions, New York: McGraw-Hill (1973), p. 63. 2. Ibid., p. 98. 3. Ibid., p. 26-27. See also p. 124, "I am an American, I feel American, and I like that feeling"; p. 131, "An American writer means..."; p. 192 "I see myself as an American writer...." 4. Leona Toker, "Nabokov and the Hawthorne Tradition," Studies in American Civilization XXXII (1987), 323-49. 5. Alexei Zverev, "Nabokov, Updike and American Literature," in Vladimir E. Alexandrov, ed. The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, New York: Garland Pub. (1995), p. 538. Zverev states: "...for Updike, Nabokov is all the more attractive precisely because he has no analogue in either the American literary tradition or among his contemporaries. ...Is it really possible to speak of Nabokov as an American writer?" 118 Nabokov Studies particular American literary tradition.6 With most we can agree that Nabokov was a writer who does not fit neatly into traditional linguistic, cultural or generic categories, and perhaps we should not force him to do so.7 But neither should we discount Nabokov's professed love for his adopted homeland, a love that had been nurtured from youth, by reading such diverse specimens of American culture as Mayne Reid's Wild West novels and William James' psychological works.8 Literary culture was, for Nabokov, a living entity.9 When naming himself an American, he was implicitly positioning himself within the self-constructed framework of American cultural elements for which he had an appreciation. Nabokov was candid about the American writers in whom he had no interest; Faulkner especially, Hemingway and Henry James for the most part.10 He was equally vocal about his loves: in his youth, Poe, some of Emerson's poetry, the short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J. D. Salinger. He liked John Updike.11 The highest praise, however, he reserved for Herman Melville. When Alfred Appel asked him in 1967 which American writers he admired, he responded "When I was young I liked Poe and I still love Melville."12 Nabokov's handwritten notes for a Book World interview record the response, "Dear Anton, Dear Leo", to a query about favorite Russian authors; "Melville" to the query about favorite Americans.13 The inclusion of 6. Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, "As American as an April in Arizona," American Literary History, 6 (1994), 325-35 (p. 325). 7. See "Extraterritorial" in Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations and Tributes, ed. Alfred Appel and Charles Newman, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson (1971), 119-27. 8. D. Barton Johnson, "Vladimir Nabokov and Captain Mayne Reid", Cycnos 10 (1993), 99-106, and D. Barton Johnson, "Tenor': Pre-Texts and Post-Texts" in A Small Alpine Form: Nabokov's Short Fiction, eds. Charles Nicol and Gennady Barabtarlo, New York: Garland (1993), 39-64. Johnson also says "VN was friendly with James' son who lived in Cambridge, Mass...

REVIEWS 355 writes: ‘as the assimilation contract was finally being undone, even diatribes against the “alien” Budapest fell apart, leaving at the outset of World War II, not one coherent metropolitan narrative that could provide any form of positive identification with the city’ (p. 11). Based on a historical contextualization of the social background of writers and the ideological debates of the time, a good knowledge of the secondary literature, a detailed discussion of the content and plots of relevant literary works and ample quotations in Hungarian (consistently translated in English) from a representative sample of novels and short stories, Jones’s book is a social history of Budapest literature. Although the portrayal of Budapest in the poetry and essays of Endre Ady and Mihály Babits is not discussed, her work fills a gap in that, while other scholars (such as Marianna Birnbaum and Gábor Sánta) have analysed portrayals of Budapest in nineteenth-century Hungarian literature, there has not been, until now, a book-length synthesis covering the early to mid twentieth century. What is missing from Jones’s work is a more sustained comparative perspective that would have specifically connected the portrayal of Budapest to that of other cities in other national literatures. Nevertheless, it is a useful addition to a growing scholarly corpus concerned with the relation between cities and the nation, cosmopolitanism and populism and left- and right-wing portrayals of the city in literature. Marywood University, Pennsylvania Alexander Vari Bertram, John and Leving, Yuri (eds). Lolita — the Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design. Print Books, Blue Ash, OH, 2013. 251 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $30.00 (paperback). The American publication of Lolita in 1958 marked a turning-point in Vladimir Nabokov’s career. It was the novel that rewarded him with worldwide fame — or rather, for many, notoriety — and with it a degree of control over his future published work that relative obscurity had so far denied him. The timing of Lolita’s publication, however, followed by Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 iconic film version, coincided with a post-war boom in paperback book production which made the novel a global phenomenon, manifested in myriad incarnations. Nabokov’s initial attempts to influence the ‘look’ of his book were quickly overwhelmed by a combination of market forces and the difficulties inherent in attempting to faithfully depict the essence of one of the most controversial novels of the late twentieth century. By exploring Lolita through the history of its covers, John Bertram and Yuri Leving highlight an aspect of Nabokov’s art that has been, up until now, largely neglected. Their project, inspired by Dieter Zimmer’s ‘Covering SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 356 Lolita’, an online collection of over 200 Lolita editions, explores the eclectic array of responses to Nabokov’s novel through its artwork, with essays by graphic designers and publishers, artists and art critics, authors, educators and Nabokov scholars, accompanied by a set of eighty newly-commissioned covers by graphic and book designers, illustrators and art students. Freed from commercial constraints, these provide intimate visual commentaries on the novel itself, whilst demonstrating the predicament of the book designer when faced with the ‘irresistible and frustrating’ challenge of encapsulating all that comprises Lolita in one single, eye-catching image (p. 39). Vintage Books designer John Gall described the process of creating his cover for Lolita’s 50th anniversary edition as ‘a project that is too easy to get wrong, too hard to get right, and doesn’t have enough room to experiment in between’ (p. 24). Whilst Ellen Pifer argues that in its soft close-up focus on a young girl’s mouth, his 2005 cover merely perpetuates the ‘popular image of a lascivious Lolita licking a lollipop in the manner of an experienced pornstar’ (p. 145), Gall’s comment establishes the issue that is at the heart of Bertram and Leving’s investigation. Every contribution to their volume deals, in differing ways, with the paratextual role of the book cover, each element of which, as Dieter Zimmer explains, ‘performs a balancing act’, and in respect of Lolita, a particularly difficult one. Nabokov himself was alert to...

Abstracts ALA 2017—Melville and Literary Influence:Reframing Tradition David Greven “The Western Critic” and the Dark Ages of Literary Criticism: Herman Melville, Matthew Arnold, and the Longer Critical Perspective K. L. Evans Cornell University I take up Melville’s prolonged engagement with Matthew Arnold’s aesthetics. My particular interest is Melville’s enthusiastic support for the distinction Arnold draws between the critic’s purpose, as he sees it—namely, to identify the thesis advanced by a critical work, preferably as stated in the author’s own words, and to estimate the degree to which the author’s effort succeeds in throwing light upon his or her chosen subject—and criticism as it had come to be understood in Arnold’s own time: a review written with either reverence or vitriol by a person given the power to make decisions. By putting Melville into dialogue with his transatlantic contemporary, I hope to better understand how Melville conceived of criticism—as it is and as it should be—and how criticism might be transformed by our proper appreciation of what Melville calls “the Western Critic”: Melvillean shorthand for the critic as Arnold imagined him but raised in America—for example on a whaling ship—rather than in England. As several of Melville’s readers have observed, in his marginal comments on Arnold’s writing, particularly his Essays in Criticism (1865) and the preface to New Poems (1867), Melville casts himself in the role of “the Western Critic”: a critic who is peculiarly “American,” in contrast to a well known Anglo-European critic like Arnold, but who, just like Arnold, dismisses modern progress while invoking a deep respect for classical culture. Melville’s respect for the writing of antiquity, discovered through his own reading and reinforced by his study of Arnold, shaped Melville’s negative reaction to “criticism” as it was practiced in his own age. [End Page 145] “Nothing Less is Here Essayed”: Language and Authorship in The Book of Salt and Moby-Dick Kacie Fodness University of South Dakota As he recounts his time aboard the Niobe, Bình—the narrator in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt and the immigrant cook for a fictional Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas—observes that “to take one’s body and willingly set it upon the open sea . . . is not an act brought about by desire but a consequence of it” (57). We understand that what matters for Bình, as it does for Ishmael, is that the story, whether lost to the ocean or stolen by the colonial figure of Gertrude Stein, is reclaimed. This moment, I suggest, is the first of many in Truong’s novel that underscore its engagement with the Melvillean tradition, a tradition defined by possibility and openness, one that invites, and even insists on, this kind of intertextuality. From the slipperiness of classification to the ways in which each author situates the body and attends to the corporeal registers of lost limbs and self-harm, The Book of Salt might be read as a modern prequel to Moby-Dick. Truong’s novel, like Melville’s before it, is not only defined by its experimental form, but also makes suspect the autobiographical enterprise. These texts are, of course, strange bedfellows. And yet, Melville’s story picks up right where Truong’s left us: alone with a nomadic, melancholy—yet deeply revolutionary—figure who has, possibly, tendered his name and whose story, certainly, must be reclaimed. Black Boys and White Whales: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Conversation with Herman Melville Caroline Chamberlin Hellman City Tech, CUNY In a May 2011 article for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that the opening lines of Moby-Dick constitute “the greatest paragraph in any work of fiction, at any point, in all of history.” Coates has taken note of Melville’s interrogation of predator and prey in the novel, observing that the white whale’s refusal to occupy the singular role of the hunted results in the consternation of the hunters. It would be easy to relate Coates’s interest in this dynamic to twenty-first-century race relations, but the author’s observations about the text defy any facile narrative...

he article is devoted to the analysis of The Assistant Producer, Vladimir Nabokov’s first short story in English. The study explores how V. Nabokov interprets the problem of the author’s identity in foreign readers’ audience. The structural-semiotic and intertextual methods are used in the paper to identify the narrative techniques organizing the intrigue in the short story: the exposure of the character as a triple agent and the narrator as an artist. The narrator focuses on the optical and sound effects of cinema as well as on the foreign accent in other characters’ speech. These peculiarities of the narrator’s perception show his perceptive and language sensitiveness inherent in an artist. The pseudo-documental cinema world includes the legends of Stepan Razin, portraits by impressionists and post-impressionists, and emigre literature. The artistic world is constructed through the images conveying the aberrations of perception, smells and the senses of touch, which are difficult to verbalize, unmotivated alliterations, allusions that are hard to interpret for foreign readers. Perceptive images and literary allusions construct the plot about the communicative mistake: from the narrator’s point of view, the cinema shows the world of Russian emigre inaccurately, but it reveals the banality of the intentions of the character-executioner. V. Nabokov assesses incompleteness as a key characteristic of intercultural communication, motivated by the differences in recipients’ sensorial and reading experience. V. Nabokov’s strategy is to highlight the inexpressible characteristics of his sensorial and creative (reading and writing) experience. Communicative mistakes inspire co-creative reading. At the beginning of his American career, V. Nabokov develops the idea that a genius writer can convey his sensorial, aesthetic, and language experience despite the communicative borders.

This article examines the pathway of those pursuing early careers in the cardiovascular sciences, both past and present, highlighting new challenges and the roadblocks they present. This article emphasizes the need for multitasking in today’s academic environment and provides information about career training opportunities offered by the American Heart Association. During the past 10 years in academia, we have heard terms like early career and early-stage investigator with increasing frequency. During my doctoral work and postdoctoral training in the early 2000s, career stage, or status, was less concerning to bench scientists. Now, however, the scientific community has come to the consensus that systematic training is integral to doctoral and postdoctoral studies, as students and fellows try to balance the requirements of their discipline with the exigencies of modern-day scientific professionalism. According to the National Institutes of Health, an early-stage investigator is defined as “those who are within 10 years of completing his/her terminal research degree or … within 10 years of completing medical residency (or the equivalent).” After the introduction of policies designed to assist early-stage investigators who are competing for funding with more established investigators, the number of competing R01 awards offered to those meeting that definition has steadily increased. In addition, special scoring consideration has been afforded to this group, along with enhanced emphasis on their proposed research projects. In fact, discussions geared toward supporting early-career researchers are hinting that steps should be taken to reduce the amount of time trainees spend in graduate school and postdoctoral training. As Chair of the Basic Cardiovascular Sciences Early Career Committee, I am privileged to write this article about the extensive training opportunities provided to early careerists by the American Heart Association (AHA). Early careerists are the innovators who will bring new ideas and technologies to the fight against cardiovascular disease. …

This thesis develops "Inference Guidelines" for the proof of connection requirements in native title determinations, in the form of a "Bench Book." This is in accordance with recommendations in the Australian Law Reform Commission's 30 April 2015 report "Connection to Country: Review of the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth)." This thesis finds that the existing case law provides a strong foundation for clear and consistent principles for inferential reasoning in native title cases, which can be supplemented by considerations drawn from historiographic and epistemological debates, cultural and linguistic challenges, and inferential theory, to form comprehensive, consistent and transparent Inference Guidelines.

The paper analyses stylistics of two famous novels by Sasha Sokolov published in the USA: “School for Fools” (1976, 1977) and “Astrophobia” (1985). The first one was highly appreciated by Vladimir Nabokov who saw a close affinity of its poetics with his own style of writing though before emigration Sokolov couldn’t gain access to his books. However the insane marginal hero fully immersed in his own fantasy and hallucinations, numerous double-characters, repeated key-words and symbolic details creating metaphoric style of writing, the multi-layered intertextuality, literary allusions, etc. – all these artistic means happened to be just similar typical features of their novels. But as the author of the article states, such poetic similarity manifests only their multiform typological convergence. A grotesque parody on “Lolita” and “Ada” – “Palisand­ria”, written in exile, on the contrary carries the peculiarities of Nabokov’s poetics to the point of absurdity by means of the same creative approach – postmodernism.