Nabokov's Canon: From Onegin to Ada by Marijeta Bozovic

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BOZOVIC, MARIJETA. Nabokov's Canon: From Onegin Ada. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016. 230 pp. $39.95 paperback; $39.95 e-book; $120.00 hardcover. This book rethinks Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor (1969) and annotated translation (1964) of Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1825-1832) as stages in the project promote a canon rivaling that codified by Anglophone modernists and their heirs among the New Critics. In the 1960s, Bozovic argues, the newly famous writer attempted redefine the legacy of transnational in alternative, continental and multi-lingual canon bringing together array of Anglophone, Russian, and French authors and positing the Russian novel as a central element of the resultant transnational canon. In the Onegin commentary, Bozovic claims, Nabokov identified transnational modernism--Chateaubriand, Byron, and Pushkin. Ada continued the project, locating the next cohort of (Flaubert, Dickens, Tolstoy) and outlining the canon of modernist writing proper, centered on Proust and Joyce, whose artistic legacy Nabokov deemed resistant the test of time--a quality he also bestowed upon his own oeuvre, including himself in the canon as a natural heir all those and contemporaries, than the outsider figure any national (5). Bozovic begins by surveying Pushkin's novel with eye on perennial Russian anxiety about cultural centers and peripheries, especially when it comes Russian literature's belatedness and the concomitant fear of unoriginality and marginality. She proceeds by examining Nabokov's exegesis of Eugene Onegin as a masterpiece of appropriation and adaptation and a model for how make new out of old, advanced out of belated, and central out of marginal (12). The Onegin commentary constructs an international romantic tradition as the precursor [Nabokov's] particular style of modernism (48), mitigating his obsessive (in Bozovic's view) concern with cultural provincialism, and providing Nabokov with a weapon to wage his own cultural capital wars (43). The study then turns Ada as allegory about literary canons whose amalgamation of national traditions--Russian, English, and French--levels the literary playing field for emigre author threatened by cultural marginalization. For Bozovic, Ada's intertextuality subsumes the artistic legacies of Proust and Joyce, transformed here into signs visible elite community of readers-cum-carriers of superior cultural knowledge--a procedure reiterating the instrumentalization of Byron and Chateaubriand in Eugene Onegin, according Nabokov's exegesis. Bozovic then addresses Ada's treatment of modernist attitudes toward time, venturing that Nabokov parodies rather than perpetuates these attitudes. The last point allows the scholar claim that Ada not a late modernist monument at all but a novel about modernism that underscores the distance between its author and his literary precursors (158). In the coda her study, Bozovic ventures that Nabokov's canon-formation project became his most important legacy for a number of writers inspired by his work--Azar Nafisi, Orhan Pamuk, J. M. Coetzee, and W. G. Sebald (165). These authors, Bozovic insists, saw in Nabokov's project emancipatory elements for their own self-fashioning as transnational writers. Unfortunately, she does not take this claim much farther, since the ensuing cursory survey of Nabokov's putative children lacks in analytical depth, appearing more as afterthought the main body of the monograph than its logical culmination. Bozovic's thought-provoking take on Nabokov's late writings at the intersection of several literary and cultural studies fields will undoubtedly prod Nabokov scholars and lay readers alike revisit their oft-dismissive attitudes toward the post-Pale Fire stage in the author's career. Hers is a productive and intellectually stimulating first step toward such a revision. …