Nabokov's Work Research Articles

Poetry and prose: the theme of exile in Nabokov's work

Poetry and prose: the theme of exile in Nabokov's work

Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin

Reviewed by: Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin Suzanne Eade Roberts Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction. Ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin. Arras: Artois Presses Université. 2021. 306 pp. €19. ISBN 978–2–84832–517–0. This stimulating collection of articles, edited by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin, encourages a re-evaluation of Nabokov as a translator, translation scholar, and object of translation. Moving beyond what tends to be known about his self-translations and the high proportion of footnotes to text in his version of Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin, it includes a new appraisal of Nabokov's literalist approach to translation, analysis of his collaborative translations, and discussion of the challenges of translating Nabokov. The volume, which contains slightly more articles in French than in English, is the latest to appear in the 'Traductologie' series of Artois Presses Université, which regularly publishes Francophone scholarship in Translation Studies, as well as translations into French. Thus, a major benefit of this book is how it presents both Anglophone and Francophone scholarly writing. The Nabokov researchers represented here are based primarily in the USA, the UK, France, and Canada. Moreover, the contributors encompass the disciplines of Translation Studies, Linguistics, English and Slavic Literature, as well as Comparative Literature. The Introduction fascinatingly reveals the hazards of this eclectic approach: in Nabokov's œuvre, it is not always easy to distinguish between a translation, an original, a self-translation, or a collaborative translation, or to harmonize the dates of first publication. Stanislav Shvabrin's enjoyable article begins by reminding us that 'the backlash against [Nabokov's] translation theory and praxis rivals the endurance of Lolita's [End Page 274] grip on its readers' (p. 87). He offers a more nuanced picture of Nabokov's literalism, drawing on Bakhtin to reassess Nabokov's translations, even youthful ones, as 'dialogic encounters' in which he can try out different approaches to literary translation. These experiments vary 'from wilful adaptation to most exacting literalism and everything else in between' (p. 96). Christine Raquet's essay draws attention to the numerous ways both of reading a text and of translating it, even though 'le tempérament littéraire autocratique de Nabokov avait souvent du mal à accepter [les choix d'un autre traducteur]' (p. 23). His collaborations became power struggles in which any other translator was expected to capitulate. In contrast, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney identifies recurrent ideas of ineffability and untranslatability in Nabokov's work, relating them to his synaesthesia. Julie Loison-Charles's contribution examines the treatment of the many foreign words used by Nabokov in Ada and the varying ways in which this multilingualism is conveyed by the novel's French and Russian translations. Similarly, Marta Arnal Gas focuses on how Nabokov's jeux linguistiques are translated into Spanish and Catalan. Russianists, meanwhile, will be interested in Lyudmila Razumova's comparison of the reception of samizdat (Soviet-era), perestroika-era, and post-perestroika translations into Russian of Pale Fire and her conclusions about the changing market for translation in Russophone nations. In terms of comparing Francophone and Anglophone Translation Studies, it may be a coincidence that two French scholars, Isabelle Paulin and Stanislas Gauthier, draw productively on the work of French translation theorist Antoine Berman in their respective analyses of the nature of Nabokov's translations or the reception of translations of Nabokov. The final section of this volume focuses on intersemiotic translation. It includes Yannicke Chupin's enlightening interview with Émilie Moreau, exploring the latter's choice to incorporate shadow play and masks into her theatre adaptation of Lolita. The appendix includes a convenient index of Nabokov's original work and his translations. This volume constitutes both a significant contribution to the different facets of Nabokov's work and an accessible examination of the challenges of translating Nabokov into several European languages. There is much to interest both Translation Studies scholars and Nabokov specialists. Suzanne Eade Roberts University of Bristol Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts by Dana Dragunoiu (review)

Reviewed by: Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Actsby Dana Dragunoiu Michael Rodgers Dragunoiu, Dana. Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2021. xxi + 264 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $120.00; £39.95; £39.95 (e-book). C riticshave long now positioned Vladimir Nabokov's writing at the intersection between ethics and aesthetics, however Dana Dragunoiu's Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Actsnot only articulates how the artistic and moral aspects contained within his work can be seen as transcendental in nature, but also privileges the 'duel' aspect of this ostensible duality. Her monograph opens with a Kantian prologue foregrounding the altruistic, philanthropic, nobleaspect of the 'moral worth of an action' in that 'it does not lie in the effect expected from it' (p. 3) — something curious considering Nabokov's expectations of 'good readers' in his quiz contained within Lectures on Literature(New York, 1980). Yet the Middle English etymology of 'courteous' as 'having manners fit for a royal court' seems apt not just because of Nabokov's aristocratic upbringing, but also because of his commitment to those qualities expected of a (Sebastian) knight: courage, honour, courtesy, justice, and a readiness to help the weak ( OED, p. 249). Dragunoiu's Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts, following on from her Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism(Evanston, IL, 2011), comprises six superbly-researched chapters — exploring Nabokov's intertextual connections with the work of Pushkin, Shakespeare, Tolstoi and Proust — and an epilogue. We enter the above discussions through the 'heuristic' lens of Erwin Panofsky's retelling of Kant's commitment to Humanitätwhile on his deathbed, something Dragunoiu subsequently relates to Nabokov's work in terms of 'courtesy [replacing] the tyranny of nature with a freely chosen tyranny of duty' (p. 5). She goes on to trace the Russian Silver Age's indebtedness to Kant's foregrounding of rational, autonomous individuals with the right to self-determination, and how Russia's liberal elite used such thought in their 'struggle against tsarist autocracy' (p. 7). Chapter one, for example, examines four episodes which demonstrate Nabokov's 'preoccupation with the quiet heroism of upholding standards of civility' (p. 20), while making the claim [End Page 159]that Nabokovian courtesy, linked to his preoccupation with deception, is akin to 'performance art' (p. 22). It does so via some particularly astute close reading of the Mademoiselle section in Speak, Memory(London, 1967, p. 28) and Krug's salvation at the cost of his autonomy in Bend Sinister(London, 1947, p. 32). Chapters two and three foreground the chivalric aspect of Dragunoiu's argument, where she claims that 'dueling enabled Nabokov to make a deductive move he found appealing: if, as Nabokov clearly believes, dueling transcends the logic of utilitarianism, fighting in a duel affords the honorable man the opportunity to perform his independence from utilitarian concerns' (pp. 85–86). The focus on transcendence continues in chapter five, 'The Art of Lying: Nabokov, Tolstoy, Botkin', by exploring the similarities and differences between Cincinnatus's world and Kinbote's Zembla, and includes Dragunoiu's assertion that 'whereas discourteous deceptions are morally wrong because they degrade and imprison, courteous deceptions are morally admirable because they uplift and liberate' (p. 129). Chapter six, historicizing Lolitaand Pninin relation to them having been written in the years following the Holocaust, makes the argument that there are limits to courtesy and art (evidenced by Pnin's difficulty in remembering Mira Belochkin and Lolita's readers being 'encouraged to extend their readerly courtesy to a rapist who makes art out of pain', p. 159). Interestingly, this idea of limitation brings us back to the tactile connotations of chapter one's vocabulary — more specifically, the idea of being pressed or 'bound' by duty (p. 18) in order to express analogous feelings of mental obligation or burden. Indeed, as much as the transcendental aspect of courtesy may allow for significant escape from the confines of the corporeal, we are frequently reminded of its physical, emotional and linguistic constraints. There are a few niggles here and there, however. Dragunoiu's insistence...

Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement by Yuri Leving

Reviewed by: Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement by Yuri Leving Tim Harte Leving, Yuri. Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement. Translated from the Russian by Keith Blasing in collaboration with the author. Bloomsbury Academic, London, New York and Dublin, 2022. xvi + 335 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £90.00; £23.99; £21.59 (e-book). 'The streetcar will vanish in twenty years or so, just as the horse-drawn tram has vanished. Already I feel it has an air of antiquity, a kind of old-fashioned charm', Vladimir Nabokov submits in his 1925 short story, 'A Guide to Berlin' (The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, New York, 2008, p. 156). For Nabokov, [End Page 751] nothing could ever be static. Possessing an acute sense of modernity's fleeting essence, the Russian-American writer had a knack for grabbing onto the various trappings of modernity and probing them while they lasted. It is Nabokov's profound appreciation of modern modes of transportation that lies at the centre of Yuri Leving's Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement. An excellent translation of his 2004 monograph, Vokzal – garazh – angar: Vladimir Nabokov i poetika russkogo urbanizma, this wide-ranging study of Nabokov's predilection for mechanized movement through the modern world takes to heart the dynamism of the era and transports the reader through an abundance of works and motion-filled motifs. Drawing upon an impressive command of Nabokoviana and modernist culture in general, Leving makes a compelling case for why Nabokov's fiction, poetry and non-fiction merits analysis through the prism of the modern, urban innovations encountered by the writer throughout his lifetime and storied career. Rather than provide a lengthy reading of just several works by Nabokov, Leving opts to take an expansive overview of the urbanism pulsating through virtually all of Nabokov's work. The result is a highly original, captivating study that comes as close as any literary study can to conveying the excitement and enticing thrills of the modern era. The critical insight and associations come fast and furious, yet that is what makes Leving's study so enthralling and unique. Not surprisingly, trains — along with those soon-to-be obsolete trams — take up the bulk of Leving's critical attention, as he explores the 'myth creation' of the train in not only Nabokov's work, but also contemporaneous literature and art of the era. Chekhov, Belyi, Bulgakov, Kafka and so many others make noteworthy cameos here to enrich the cultural tapestry woven by Leving as he delves into the modern milieu in which Nabokov emerged as a writer, first in Russia and then in Western Europe and the United States. As Leving argues, for Nabokov the train 'is not so much a means of conveyance for the characters, as much as it is a means for transporting references based on the rules of stylistics, grammar, and the game of literature' (p. 113). Engaging with Nabokov in this game, Leving probes the ethos and essence of train travel, even the crashes and resounding significance of love and fate on the rails. Although the bulk of Leving's study focuses on the railroad, cars and aeroplanes also figure in the exhilarating discussion. As Leving notes, the car did not inspire Nabokov to the extent that the train did, but anyone familiar with Lolita will know that the automobile represented no minor motif in Nabokov's work. From his automobile ride to school (see Speak, Memory) to descriptions of love-making in automobiles (see Mary) to meandering drives amidst the towering trees of Vermont (see Pnin), the automobile would work its way into Nabokov's celebrated oeuvre. The same goes for the aeroplane; [End Page 752] Nabokov may have been reluctant until late in life to travel by air, but reminiscences of early aviation (see 'Time and Ebb') and transatlantic flights (see Pale Fire) figure in Nabokov's work. Here Leving channels the poetry and non-fiction of Aleksandr Blok, among other notable cultural figures of the early twentieth century, in establishing the prominence of aeronautics for the pre-Revolutionary Russia in which Nabokov came to maturation. Well-illustrated and featuring a number of relatively rare auto-related photos...

Modernist mythologism of Vladimir Nabokov’s creative work (based on the material of the novels “Mary”, “The Gift”, “Invitation to a Beheading”)

The subject of research in the article is the early prose of Vlaimir Nabokov, the writer of the Russian diaspora, from the point of view of the mythologising of the creative process, which was a characteristic feature of the art of modernism. The study notes that Nabokov builds his texts as artistic mythology, giving art a sacred meaning. Unlike the ontological function of the ancient myth, mythologism in modernist literature is aimed at the aesthetic perception of reality. The writer intentionally mythologises his texts, saturating them with mythological codes, revealed in such writing techniques as intertextuality, allusions, associations, including the work in a wide cultural context. It can be concluded that the mythological codes in Nabokov's modernism act as the literary work of the author who is the Creator of his texts, rather than as a formula for the world order or an explanation of reality. When studying Nabokov's works, one should keep in mind that the writer uses his codes pointwise to create new artistic structures instead of interpreting the traditional myth.

Hazel Shade's Russian Sisterhood, or Is Pale Fire a Feminist Novel? In memory of Gennady Barabtarlo

Abstract: The essay traces Nabokov's representation of women from the Russian-language works in which he shows a sustained interest in women's lives to the English-language works whose plots often double as whodunnits, driven as they are by questions such as "who is she?" and "what has she done?" I argue that The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, "The Vane Sisters," Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada dramatize what feminist commentators have identified as properties of patriarchal literary representation: the primacy of women coupled by their absence (De Lauretis), under-description (Heldt), and action delimited by the Love Story plot (Russ). Though some of Nabokov's works perpetuate these conventions, his most enduringly mysterious fiction forces readers to care and wonder about women characters who are under-described and overlooked. The essay also uses the insights of feminist scholars who have written on Lolita (Kauffman, Patnoe, Herbold) to argue that Pale Fire extends the achievements of Lolita by staging a different kind of entrapment: readers are seduced into colluding with Shade's obliteration of his daughter Hazel by focusing too much on her body and disregarding her mind. In one of Pale Fire's subtlest ironies, Shade treats his grief at his daughter's loss by foregrounding his own spiritual quest but continuing to ignore hers. I argue further that the importance of Hazel's spiritual strivings become most clear if seen through the lens of Russia's literary tradition. The second half of the essay traces important bonds of kinship that connect Hazel to Tatyana Larin, the female protagonist of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and Cecily von Lindenborn, the protagonist of Karolina Pavlova's only novel A Double Life (1848). Pavlova's novel, combining as it does prose and verse, offers more than a formal precedent for Pale Fire: the plot rescues Hazel from the captivity of the Love Story plot and places her in a context that is more relevant to her own concerns. The essay ends with a tribute to Gennady Barabtarlo, for whom Hazel's predicament anticipated the predicament of another beloved but disregarded daughter: Martyshka of Tarkovsky's Stalker.

ФУНКЦИИ ВСТАВНЫХ КОНСТРУКЦИЙ В ПОЭЗИИ И ПРОЗЕ В. В. НАБОКОВА

The article examines peculiarities of using parentheses in V.V. Nabokov's lyrics and prose. The author characterizes the main directions of analysing parentheses in modern linguistics (analysis from the functional point of view, taking into account the genre specificity of the work in the aspect of communicative registers of speech, from the point of view of dialogue organization of the text, as a way of actualizing information in literary text, as a marker of actualizing irony, as a means of implementing the category of chronotope, as a means of organizing the metatextual structure of the work, as a syntactic construction and syntactic process, as a means of stylizing the literary text). The article determines the most characteristic functions of parentheses in the texts of the author, the connection of parentheses with various text levels, their role in the overall structure of the artistic text. Not only the most typical, but also the unique functions of parentheses in V. V. Nabokov's poetry and prose are described in detail. The author highlights the main aspects of language game in the framework of parentheses, as well as the means of interaction between the pa-rentheses and the main context in V. V. Nabokov's poetry and prose. The main functional features of the parentheses are determined in terms of the interaction of various informative and subject-speech plans of the text, intertextual rela-tions, as well as in terms of forming the spatial and temporal structure of the work. The analysis carried out in this study identifies the most typical functions of parentheses in V. V. Nabokov's works: switching (and combining) different tem-poral plans of the work, modeling communication between the narrator and the reader (organizing a conversational game with the reader), motivating the artistic image, detailing, forming comparisons, and conveying evaluative infor-mation.

О ШАХМАТНЫХ ПРОТОТИПАХ РОМАНА В. В. НАБОКОВА «ЗАЩИТА ЛУЖИНА»

The article is devoted to discussing the likely prototypes of the figure of Luzhin - the protagonist of V. Nabokov's novel The Defense. Studying the biographical and chess contexts, analyzing the plot components of the novel related to the game, and taking into account the psychological aspects of the early XX century chess history, the authors prove that the versions of the main character's prototypes presented in previous studies of Nabokov's works are controversial. Among these prototypes are the chess players famous at different periods of the past, sharing only one thing with Nabokov's hero – a mental disorder at the end of his life. The authors of the article present and summarize new facts, not considered before, which are somehow reflected in the text of the novel, and the circumstances of the chess history and the world around it taking place at that time. This data became the basis for a new version that one of the prototypes of the protagonist's “chess impersonation” in the novel The Defense could be the Russian (and later Danish – by new citizenship) chess grandmaster Alexander Nimtsovich, whose life path crossed Nabokov's more than once. The famous chess opening “The Nimtsovich Defense” finds compositional and motif parallels in the corresponding scenes of the novel, and the narrator's reflection (close to the hero's reflection) on the specifics of playing chess is quite consistent with Grandmaster Nimtsovich's chess ideas, summarized by him in his book My System (1925). One of Nimzowitsch's biggest successes was winning the tournament in Karlovy Vary (Czechoslovakia) in July-August 1929 – at the very time when Nabokov was busy working on the text of his novel The Defense.

Beyond the Butterfly: Three Hundred Animal Species in Nabokov's Fiction

While there are multiple journal articles and four book-length studies that pin down the butterflies in Nabokov's fiction and life, the larger fauna of Nabokov's fiction is comparatively unexplored. As I show in this note, in addition to Nabokov's more than 200 moths and butterflies, there are more than 300 animal species mentioned in his extant prose fiction. To inspire further research, the article lists Nabokov's 300 animal species in seven taxonomic classes and references the novels and novellas in which they appear. The list itself is an argument for the specificity and variety of Nabokov's writing, a testament to his tendency to meticulously label and categorize phenomena, and evidence of Nabokov's expansive interest in non-human animals. The list is also an argument for reading across Nabokov's works to identify characteristics that are otherwise difficult to see from focusing on a single work. While all of Nabokov's fictions have a range of animal species, the extraordinary range and biodiversity of Nabokov's fauna is only apparent from a macroscopic perspective. I suggest that no other Anglophone twentieth-century author wrote as expansively on animals as Nabokov.

Lynchers at Heart: De-ciphering "Signs and Symbols"

"Lynchers at Heart: De-ciphering 'Signs and Symbols," offers a new reading of Nabokov's celebrated story. First, it locates a hostile narrative presence, a homodiegetic (or even paradiegetic) narrator within the story, who works to portray the protagonists' situation as bleakly as possible. Second, it views the story as an attack by numbers on both art and the heart. The status of numbers in particular, and of de-coding strategies in general, is fraught in Nabokov's work, as the author himself seems to have both succumbed to and resisted interpretive 'calculation' in composing his fiction. "Signs and Systems," however should be read as the work that provides his most compelling defense of "incalculability."

Popoff , Alexandra Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century (review)

REVIEWS 163 Dematagoda draws from his construal of other Nabokov works, especially the plays, The Eye and Despair, appear unsubstantiated and driven by the critic’s own theoretical agenda. For example, Dematagoda’s claim that The Waltz Invention is ‘a sublimation of Nabokov’s own megalomaniac fantasy’ (pp. 45, 46) is corroborated by little more than an insistence that Nabokovian ‘instances of denial’ (in this case, of the play’s ‘topical import’) ‘are never so strident than when there is something important to conceal’ (p. 46). In a similar vein, Dematagoda’s analysis of Hermann Karlovich’s leftist sympathies as ‘caricatures’ that reveal ‘a very naïve understanding of Marxism on Nabokov’s part’ (p. 82) is grounded in a confused perception of Nabokov’s rejection of Marxism as an ontology, rather than a system of ideas that gave rise to Bolshevism, with its disregard for human rights, the uniqueness of every individual and freedom of artistic self-expression. (Nabokov, Dematagoda says, ‘seeks to mock Marxism for what he views to be its reductive and absurd interpretation of the material world’, p. 85.) This confusion may be grounded in Dematagoda’s most challenging, but also not fully proven, proposition that Nabokov’s rejection of Symbolism in the 1920s–30s was ‘perhaps also due to the similarities he perceived between Symbolist epistemology and other, putatively more rational, epistemological systems such as Freudian psychoanalysis, or even Marxism’ (p. 74). The main controversy of this work lies in Dematagoda’s seeing other researchers’ interpretations of Nabokov the writer and thinker as ‘overly generous’ and grounded in the ‘attachment which scholars and general readers alike feel towards Nabokov’s body of work’ (p. 188). Dematagoda is obviously taking a less-beaten path in Nabokov scholarship, but since he refuses to appreciate Nabokov’s legacy, seeing in it a ‘conduit for a variety of humanistic ideals: kindness, beauty, vague universalistic notions of freedom, the struggle against tyranny — things which are often at odds with the profoundly subjective and tendentious character of the work itself’ (p. 192) — he may be heading in the direction that many others in the field prefer to sidestep. Bard College, NY Olga Voronina Popoff, Alexandra. Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2019. xi + 395 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $32.50: £25.00. The Soviet writer Vasilii Grossman (1905–64) has been the subject of renewed interest with the recent publication of Robert Chandler’s English translation of Stalingrad (London, 2019), the oft-forgotten prequel to the author’s most SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 164 famous novel, Life and Fate. Alexandra Popoff’s new biography of Grossman is a timely companion to this publication, contextualizing the author’s life and works within the events that shaped both his own existence and the course of twentieth-century European history, namely the Second World War, the Holocaust and Soviet repression. Popoff’s research also brings to light important new information about the source material for Grossman’s final work, Everything Flows, in which the author represented the Gulag, collectivization and famine in Ukraine. The biography is structured chronologically, beginning with Grossman’s upbringing in pre-revolutionary Berdichev’s large Jewish community, his student years in Kyiv and Moscow, and his work as a chemist in the mines of the Donbass. It then assesses the beginnings of Grossman’s literary career in the early 1930s and the peak of his popularity as a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper, Red Star, during the Second World War. A large proportion of the text is rightly allocated to Grossman’s post-war struggles with the Soviet authorities. These chapters include details about the Black Book, a compilation of documentary evidence of Nazi atrocities against the Jews on Soviet soil that was suppressed in 1948, then Stalingrad which, though highly censored, first appeared in 1952 as For a Just Cause. Subsequently, its sequel, Life and Fate, was ‘arrested’ by the KGB in 1961 for its daring comparisons between Nazism and Stalinism. In the final chapters, the text goes into detail about Everything Flows, generally subject to less scholarly attention than Life and Fate, before describing the untimely circumstances...

Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic: A Study of His Novels and Plays, 1926–1939 by Dematagoda Udith (review)

SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 162 Dematagoda, Udith. Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic: A Study of His Novels and Plays, 1926–1939. Cultural History and Literary Imagination, 29. Peter Lang, Oxford, New York and Vienna, 2017. xii + 203 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €51.90: £42.00: $63.95 (paperback). Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic is a slim volume packedwithstatementsthatresistmostconventionsofcontemporaryNabokov scholarship. Its author, Udith Dematagoda, whose research converges around such topics as ‘ideology and aesthetics in the context of twentieth-century modernist English and European literature, masculinity and fascism’, explores the evolution of Nabokov’s ideas on art, politics, totalitarianism and social responsibility in the two decades preceding World War Two, from the year when Mary was published to the completion of The Gift. Brisk and provocative, his analysis resists not only the writer’s own professed opposition to civic engagement in literature and to art’s political intent, but also what Dematagoda sees as modern Nabokovians’ fallibility — their upholding ‘the idea of Nabokov being a novelist of serious moral fiction’ (p. 116). The outcome of this study, which includes a sweeping chapter on drama (The Man from the USSR and The Waltz Invention) and three more detailed chapterlong explorations of The Eye, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading and The Gift, is a position that considers Nabokov’s ‘uncompromising insistence on individualism […] antithetical to the egalitarian tenets of liberalism which Nabokov supposedly adhered to’ (p. 186). Dematagoda is not alone in his insistence on Nabokov’s adherence to an ideological viewpoint ripe with artistic and political consequences — Dana Dragunoiu, Galya Diment, Maxim Shrayer, Julian W. Connolly, and others, have convincingly established this commitment. The originality of his work lies in his showing that Nabokov’s aesthetics was the foundation and dialectical refraction of his ideology as well as in demonstrating how the writer’s ideological views changed over time (p. 42). Dematagoda challenges the widespread understanding that Nabokov’s aesthetics was steeped in ideas of Symbolism; makes a valuable point about the writer’s dictatorial tendencies when suggesting, in his reflections on Nabokov the dramatist, that ‘his own aesthetic vision’ placed ‘emphasis on the tyrannical will of the individual artist’ (p. 53); and engages his readers in a stimulating exploration of Invitation to a Beheading as Nabokov’s response to the First Writer’s Congress, Gor´kii’s postulates about the civic value of Socialist Realism, and Chernyshevskii’s ideas as the basis for the Bolshevik discourse on literature and its social function (pp. 110–21). Many of Dematagoda’s insights into Nabokov’s prose and dramaturgy are insightful and merit the readers’ attention. That said, the conclusions REVIEWS 163 Dematagoda draws from his construal of other Nabokov works, especially the plays, The Eye and Despair, appear unsubstantiated and driven by the critic’s own theoretical agenda. For example, Dematagoda’s claim that The Waltz Invention is ‘a sublimation of Nabokov’s own megalomaniac fantasy’ (pp. 45, 46) is corroborated by little more than an insistence that Nabokovian ‘instances of denial’ (in this case, of the play’s ‘topical import’) ‘are never so strident than when there is something important to conceal’ (p. 46). In a similar vein, Dematagoda’s analysis of Hermann Karlovich’s leftist sympathies as ‘caricatures’ that reveal ‘a very naïve understanding of Marxism on Nabokov’s part’ (p. 82) is grounded in a confused perception of Nabokov’s rejection of Marxism as an ontology, rather than a system of ideas that gave rise to Bolshevism, with its disregard for human rights, the uniqueness of every individual and freedom of artistic self-expression. (Nabokov, Dematagoda says, ‘seeks to mock Marxism for what he views to be its reductive and absurd interpretation of the material world’, p. 85.) This confusion may be grounded in Dematagoda’s most challenging, but also not fully proven, proposition that Nabokov’s rejection of Symbolism in the 1920s–30s was ‘perhaps also due to the similarities he perceived between Symbolist epistemology and other, putatively more rational, epistemological systems such as Freudian psychoanalysis, or even Marxism’ (p. 74). The main controversy of this work lies in Dematagoda’s seeing other researchers’ interpretations of Nabokov the writer and thinker as ‘overly generous’ and...

Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Priscilla Meyer

Reviewed by: Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Priscilla Meyer Leona Toker Priscilla Meyer, Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 188 pp. The growing recognition of the thought-suffused texture and artistic excellence of Vladimir Nabokov's work has in recent decades gained expression in books wholly devoted to one of his novels—Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire, Ada— or even to a single short story such as "Signs and Symbols." In the past few years three books have been devoted to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, a novel once regarded by many (including, regrettably, my younger self) as brilliant but flawed and mainly transitional from Nabokov's writing in Russian to his English-language fiction. This new interest in the novel has been partly stimulated by a growing corpus of biographical materials—in the first place, Brian Boyd's biography of the novelist. The first two of these books annotate the text chapter by chapter and offer solutions to the enigma represented by the novel's mysterious co-protagonist, the English writer Sebastian Knight, whose "real life" is being sought by his Russian half-brother V., the narrator of the novel. In Absolute Solution (2013) Andrew Caulton foregrounds the echoes of British detective fiction, especially that of Arthur Conan Doyle, in Nabokov's text in order to argue that Sebastian's secret is that he is a British intelligence agent, a version of the Scarlet Pimpernel (and that V. almost gets killed by spies of a hostile power in one of the novel's central episodes). In Silent Love (2016), Gerard de Vries makes a different tentative suggestion: the secret behind Sebastian's seemingly cruel break-up with Clare Bishop is his homosexuality (a criminal offence in antebellum Britain and hence, indeed, to be kept moot even should V. become aware of it). The most recent book, Priscilla Meyer's Nabokov and Indeterminacy, abstains from offering a solution to the enigma of the protagonist's character and conduct and, on the contrary, discusses different aspects of indeterminacy in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in relation to Nabokov's other novels, in particular Despair, Lolita, and Pale Fire, showing that the themes and techniques of this novel, written in 1938–1939, are integral features of Nabokov's larger corpus. Whereas in Postmodernist Fiction Brian McHale places Nabokov on the borderline between modernism and post-modernism (modernism being dominated by epistemological concerns and post-modernism by ontological ones), Meyer traces the post-modernist features of Nabokov's work, which gain the clearest [End Page 182] articulation in the 1962 Pale Fire, back to his last pre-war novel, and associates them with Nabokov's view that the term "reality" makes sense only in quotation marks. For Meyer this view of reality is not merely an epistemological issue but also a matter of metaphysical uncertainty staged in Nabokov's worlds. Her book belongs to the stream of Nabokov scholarship that foregrounds the theme of the "otherworld" and argues that search for a metaphysical insight, ineluctably incomplete, characterizes the bulk of Nabokov's corpus: "Nabokov has set his linguistic and cultural worlds into tension with the unknowable beyond; he cannot know if he can ever return in the next world to what he has lost in this one, but assuages the pain of that uncertainty by dedicating his work to optimysticism" (18). In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, however, the coinage "optimystic" is used ironically, and mainly in application to believers in the "golden paradise" of established religions (1959: 177). At the beginning of Speak, Memory Nabokov protests against "the walls of time" that separate him and his "bruised fists" from the "free world of timelessness" (1966: 20). Did his fists make a dent in the walls? Meyer's book associates the indeterminacy of Nabokov's plots and layers of meaning with the unavailability of an answer to this question. Yet in first-rate literary works indeterminacy can be an achievement rather than a failure and is accompanied by overdetermination: the reader is stimulated to set...

The novels of V Nabokov: psycholinguistic features in fiction of the XX century

Studying Vladimir Nabokov’s works, we have been convinced of the continuity of the social codes, beginning with antiquity (there is a special place for mythology in Nabokov’s creative works), and ending with the XX century. However, in our opinion, the most powerful influence was exerted on the writer by the cultural traditions of Europe, especially by literature of the XIX century. It is not possible to study all the aspects of the continuity, so within the framework of this article we have considered the most important ones, which, due to the continuity, acquire a deeper philosophical meaning and an additional connotation. We analyzed the existing themes, motives and images in V. Nabokov's creative works, and we saw the influence of F. Nietzsche, A. Bergson, M. Proust and D. G. Lawrence on the artistic method of the writer.

Stylistic Structuring of Nabokov’s Metaprose in the Context of Modernism and Postmodernism Poetics

The article considers the actual problem of determining the creative method of V. Nabokov in the aspect of artistic principles of modernism and postmodernism. Using the method of historical and discursive analysis, the features of the metanovel as the main genre of the writer's prose are characterized. It is shown that the narcissism of Nabokov's texts appears in the individual rhetoric of the writer, refuting the stereotypes of artistic perception formed in the classical tradition, signaling the aesthetic superiority of the writer. Stylistic codes forming a narcissistic novel are revealed: mythologism, deconstruction, double coding, intertextuality. The ways of their realization in the novels are described: individualization of linguistic techniques, metaphorization, allegorism, rhizomacy of structure of the text, play on cultural codes. It is established that as a means of author's self-expression, the language of Nabokov's works has value in itself, the writer develops his own way of aesthetic attitude to the word. It is concluded, that the identified stylistic codes determine Nabokov's works as belonging to both modernism and postmodernism. These codes form a metatext, or supertext, a special type of non-classical prose, in which the language becomes a specific coding formation, allowing the author to present aesthetic and intellectual information, thus starting creative relations with the reader.

A Tribute to Priscilla Meyer

A Tribute to Priscilla Meyer Zoran Kuzmanovich (bio) In this tribute I will limit myself to Priscilla's 35 years of intelligent and devoted service to the cause of the Nabokov society and Nabokov scholarship. Priscilla has authored over 50 publications on Nabokov, made over fifty public appearances as a Nabokov expert, and taught some of this country's most innovative courses on Nabokov's work. She has twice presided over the Nabokov society, and since 2001 she has been the editor of The Nabokovian's feature "Notes and Brief Commentaries." Both her scholarship and her teaching have won national prizes. The rest of Priscilla's CV is on the Wesleyan website. However enviable such a list of achievements, the CV is a matter of public record, and like most public records, it fails to make clear what Priscilla's day-to-day presence as a teacher and scholar means to her students and colleagues. The CV also fails abysmally to give the proper measure of the woman since all those titles, functions, awards and honors were used by Priscilla to promote Wesleyan University and Vladimir Nabokov, not Priscilla Meyer. But Priscilla Meyer is a person who stands out among us by her bravery, originality, and generosity. Let's take each in turn. Priscilla was not intimidated by Nabokov's protestations that he was immune to influence nor his interdicts regarding the connection between his fictions and his private life. Priscilla's first book on Nabokov proceeded from her assumption that Pale Fire on one very important level is an encoded autobiography, and that it had been influenced by things Nordic: "The attempt to make sense of his father's assassination is the ultimate moving force behind Nabokov's exploration of the history, literature, natural evolution, and language of the North" (5). So what the sailor has hidden is really Nabokov's "immortalized love for his father in a series of reflections on martyred royalty in history and art." Priscilla's bravery is also evident in her reviews especially where she points out the difference between the well-wrought and the overwrought. Yet her own prose is remarkably free of two faults that plague much of scholarly writing on Nabokov. The first of these is the unconscious adoption of vocabulary and cadences that imitate Nabokov's own writing; and the second is calculated incoherence that often passes for profundity. In fact Priscilla's skill at sympathetic exposition is such that the ideas of others can sometimes seem more interesting in her reviews than they were in the original. Clarity for her is a moral obligation even in the world some of us glumly, some of us glibly, and some of us gullibly refer to as "constructed." Her originality can be summed up by one of her own phrases: "cultural synthesis." It unites her scholarship and her teaching, and it provides her students with tools and attitudes they need to function as literate readers. Cultural synthesis is not reducible to encyclopedic annotation or a study of influences. Done right, it requires its practitioner to discover in Nabokov's narratives phonetic, rhetorical, syntactic or semantic patterns whose expression is marked by their differences from what seems to be Nabokov's normative prose. The discovery has to be followed by the identification of the underlying text and an explanation of its functioning within ontological layers of the Nabokov texts. The professor could of course furnish such linkages. And with her knowledge of French and Russian literature, Priscilla was in a position to do precisely that. She chose not to do so, knowing all along that students rarely read by the flashes of lightning that emanate from their professor's witty forehead. In turn, her students realized that great teaching makes the students seek out more learning, not more professor. Finally, we come to Priscilla's generosity. When a scholar divided between himself and Mrs. Nabokov all the credit for discovering Nabokov's "two-world" cosmology, Priscilla offered the mildest of protests by merely pointing out she and Don Johnson had that been publishing on the two-world thesis for almost a decade. I know my protest would not have been so mild because...

Культурная самоидентификация постреволюционной эмиграции (на примере творчества В.В. Набокова)

Культурная самоидентификация постреволюционной эмиграции (на примере творчества В.В. Набокова)

An Interview with Maurice Couturier

An Interview with Maurice Couturier Zoran Kuzmanovich Note: This much overdue interview is the first in the series of Nabokov Studies interviews wuth pioneering Nabokovian scholars. It serves as a preface to Prof. Couturier's FORUM piece, and it took place on November 20, 2017, at Centre Commercial CAP 3000, 66 promenade Jacques Yves Cousteau, 06700 Saint-Laurent-du-Var, France. ZK: The first question is always going to be "How did you end up becoming a Nabokov scholar?" MC: It's fairly easy to explain. When I started to teach, I followed an MA correspondence course with a professor at the Sorbonne, André Le Vot [repeats name], in which the set books were The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne Booth, The Sound and the Fury and Pale Fire. Good books. Very good choice. ZK: What year was that? MC: I followed this course in '69. And that was the first time I heard of Nabokov. And then in 1970, I went back to the states, to the University of Notre Dame. When I visited the Notre Dame bookstore, I found The Annotated Lolita which had just come out. So, I bought it. That should have been September 1970. And I soon bought Ada through the Book of the Month Club. That's how I really discovered Nabokov and really fell in love with him. At the same time, I was doing another dissertation – there were two types of dissertations in France the short one and the long one. Now there is only one. The short one I was doing was on a Wisconsin writer that you probably have never heard of though she got the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, Zona Gale. She was a good friend of Bob La Follette and Eleanor Roosevelt. I wrote this dissertation at Notre Dame, from '70 to '72, while also researching Nabokov's work. When I came back from the States, I defended my dissertation on Zona Gale, took the "Agrégation," a very competitive exam, and was appointed at the Sorbonne where I continued to work on Nabokov. I had chosen as research director André Le Vot, a marvelous man to whom I am very grateful; he wasn't totally convinced by my structuralist approach yet backed me all the way. I took the liberty of staging him in my first novel, La Polka piquée, one of the first global campus novels by the way, but under an anagram, René Tadlov. My good friend Malcolm Bradbury listed Tadlov in the bibliography of a clever little book, My Strange Quest for Mensonge. Needing my permission, Malcolm arranged to meet me in Brittany where he was vacationing with David Lodge. That was also the beginning of my long friendship with David whose autobiography I am currently translating. Sorry for this digression. ZK: And how does Ronald Barthes end up on your thesis committee? MC: An American friend of mine, Harry Blake, a draft dodger, had done some work for Barthes and Foucault as a translator. He managed to help me get an appointment with Roland Barthes at L'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and I had no difficulty, curiously, to make Barthes agree to sit on the panel of my Doctoral Defense. What were his reasons? Nabokov? I still wonder if he had ever read him. My structuralist approach? Perhaps. My friendship with one of his probable lovers? Perhaps again. More likely, his desire to set foot again at the Sorbonne where he had long been persona non grata. I found out a few weeks before the defense that he had lost the copy of my dissertation, so I sent him another one. And on the day of the defense, 23rd of October 76, we had to wait for him at the Sorbonne for at least fifteen minutes. He arrived at 2:15. The defense took place in the Louis Liar amphitheater, a kind of chapel with portraits of seventeenth century writers on the walls; it was full on this occasion, because of Roland Barthes' presence probably. He had read only part of my dissertation as I found out after he gave me back the second copy I had sent him and...

Motif of Infidelity in V. Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark

The aim of this paper is to present a model and function of infidelity in one of V. Nabokov Russian language novels, The Laughter in the Dark. Infidelity motif plays a key role in characters creation and action development. Characters are immersed in a complicated infidelity scheme, interchange, forming unusual plot spider web. Discussed novel, in the means of structure and subject, reminds previous novel of Russian-American author – King, Queen, Knave. Moreover, infidelity motif is additionally complemented by other, repeating in Nabokov works, motifs (butterflies, mirrors, crime and punishment, and more).

Staging <em>Lolita</em> (and ‘Saving’ Humbert): Nabokov, Shchedrin and the Art of Adaptation

This article examines Rodion Shchedrin's operatic adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita. Analysing Shchedrin's methods of textual, dramaturgical and musical adaptation, the article demonstrates the extent to which Shchedrin's opera is preoccupied with the text and textures of Nabokov's novel. It also examines Shchedrin's treatment of the aesthetic-moral dichotomy at the heart of Nabokov's work, revealing this through a consideration of the work's compositional strategies to be Shchedrin's primary artistic concern.