Vladimir Nabokov Research Articles

‘THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE’: SURVEYING THE FEAR FACTOR OF STRANGER DANGER THROUGH THE LENS OF NABOKOV’S LOLITA (1955)

‘The Call is Coming from inside the House’ trope, emblematic of betrayal, has permeated both visual and written narratives, evoking dread and questioning characters’ innocence. This paper critically explores the fear instilled by the stranger danger narrative, juxtaposing it with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) to underline the insidious nature of domestic abuse. While once a potent social warning, the overuse of the trope has desensitised audiences to domestic violence, rendering it banal. The narrative unpacks how social conditioning perpetuates fear, particularly among women and girls, confining them indoors with potential abusers. Drawing parallels between the narrative of Lolita and real-life instances of grooming and abuse, the paper elucidates how abusers manipulate victims into complicity. By examining Lolita as a lens through which to understand social dynamics, the paper prompts a revaluation of cultural tropes and their implications for gender relations and individual autonomy. Through Humbert Humbert’s manipulation of Lolita’s memories and perceptions, the paper highlights the pervasive control exerted by abusers. The paper advocates for a multilayered understanding of fear and safety, challenging the narratives that perpetuate gender-based violence. It critiques social responses to stranger danger, arguing that they perpetuate victim-blaming culture and fail to address root causes. By unpacking the parallels between the patriarchal culture and grooming tactics, the paper finally exposes the false security offered by domesticity, as in Lolita.

Phantom Train as Integral Image in Vladimir Nabokov’s Mary (1926)

Phantom Train as Integral Image in Vladimir Nabokov’s Mary (1926)

Impossible Love

Abstract This article weaves the impossibilities of Dambudzo Marechera’s life under colonialism, racism, poverty, and violence, and of love between the Zimbabwean poet and the German scholar, Flora Veit-Wild. In this article, Veit-Wild is characterized as an “unreliable narrator” and “inside trader” due to her relationship with the poet. However, it is this position of Veit-Wild that allows us to decipher one of Marechera’s most difficult poems, “My Arms Vanished Mountains.” In using Veit-Wild as a window into my intepretation of Marechera, I also link Marechera’s poetics with that of a highly unlikely counterpart, Vladimir Nabokov. The impossibilities I allude to find their representation in Dambudzo Marechera’s “My Arms Vanished Mountains,” the poem Veit-Wild saved by chance.

Nabokov and Freud: Solus Rex vs Oedipus Rex

Abstract: The enigma of Nabokov's lifelong enmity with Freud perpetually attracts research attention. In this article, the author analyzes the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov's demonization of Freud by surveying previous explanations of this phenomenon and proposing an alternative explanation of Nabokov perceiving Freud not as a "father figure" or a "precursor," but as a dangerous and influential rival within the field of psychology as opposed to literature. The author asserts that Nabokov's feud with Freud is centered on the question of the soul. In particular, Nabokov strives to position himself within the realm of "soul interpretation" or "soul fiction" as a "subject supposed to know" and to establish himself as a superior hermeneutical authority. Finally, the author draws a parallel between Nabokov's attitude to Freud and Freud's approach to Nietzsche.

A Surface Reading of Vladimir Nabokov

A Surface Reading of Vladimir Nabokov

EXILE AND RUSSIAN INTELLECTUAL RESPONSE: A STUDY OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S PNIN

Russian first-wave emigre literature portrays the experiences of Russian exiled intellectuals who were opponents of the ideology of Leninized Russia, or the Russia of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks. Numerous thousands of Russian intellectuals were forced to leave as a result of their country’s totalitarian leaders. For these intellectuals, Leninized Russia has become a dangerous place, even a prison. In Pnin, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov shows the lives of first-wave Russian intellectuals in exile and their responses. Through the main character, Professor Pnin, Nabokov tries to illustrate to his readers the path taken by many Russian exiles. He also intends to show how intellectuals in exile like Timofey Pnin wish to be part of a social community and strengthen their sense of belonging in order to overcome loneliness and alienation in the new country. Professor Pnin and other representatives of the first wave’s feeling of toska towards their homeland, pre-Revolutionary Russia, became stronger when they faced difficulties in the United States of America and when they felt inferior among other colleagues. The study reveals that Russian intellectuals in exile like Professor Timofey Pnin may partially compensate their feelings of toska towards their home, pre-Revolutionary Russia, through writing. By doing this, they may motivate themselves to achieve peak experience and transform exile into an enriching experience. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine Vladimir Nabokov's protagonist, Professor Timofey Pnin's exile experience and his response. The paper intends to show that Nabokov, through his main character, displays the fact that, despite the pain of being far from their homeland, for Russian intellectuals like Professor Timofey, the unwitting choice of exile becomes the right decision.

“Sirens” by Joyce and the Joys of Sirin: Lilac, Sounds, Temptations

The article is devoted to the musical context of the works of James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov. Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the most important literary texts of the twentieth century, is filled with musical allusions and various musical techniques. The chapter “Sirens” is the most interesting in this context as it features a “musical” form and contains a large number of musical quotations. The myth of the singing sirens, recreated by Joyce in images and characters from the modern world, encapsulates the idea of erotic seduction, bringing threat and doom to the seduced. Joyce offers a new version of the sea world filled with music, creating a system of musical leitmotifs and lexical patterns within the text. Developing the themes of temptation, the danger that temptation entails, doom, uniting with the vital forces of the world, and loneliness, Joyce in “Sirens” reveals the semantics of music, showing the specific nature of its effect on listeners. Vladimir Nabokov, who praised Ulysses and devoted a lecture to “Sirens”, is much less musical than Joyce. However, he, like Joyce, also refers to the images of singing sirens and the accompanying images of the aquatic world. One of the central, meaning-making signs in his work is the “Sirin complex”, his pseudonym. This sign, which refers to a large number of pretexts, refers in particular to the lilac (siren’) and to the mythological “musical” sirens. As in Joyce’s work, sirens are present in his texts as mermaids and naiads, or as figures of seducers who fulfil their function and bring doom. Joyce and Nabokov are also united by the presence of recurrent leitmotifs, lexical patterns, and the presence of auditory impressions in their text that are evoked by the sound of the everyday world.

The Personal and the Political: Azar Nafisi’s Memoir as a Feminist Lens into Iranian Society

This paper highlights the points that Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books brings out the social and political life of people in Iran. It is a memoir by Azar Nafisi that explores the intersection of literature, personal freedom, and the oppressive political climate in Iran. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a poignant memoir that takes readers on a journey into the heart of post-revolutionary Iran, where Azar Nafisi, a literature professor, forms a secret reading group with her female students. Against the backdrop of a repressive regime, Nafisi uses the works of Western literary classics, particularly Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, to examine the complexities of personal and intellectual freedom. Through the lens of literature, Nafisi explores the lives of her students and delves into the power of literature to challenge societal norms. The narrative weaves together the personal struggles of the women in the group with a broader commentary on the impact of political upheaval on individual lives. Nafisi's courageous exploration of the transformative power of literature serves as a testament to the enduring human spirit and the pursuit of intellectual freedom in the face of adversity.

Удовольствие от текста: Гедонистические мотивы писательского труда в метафикциональной прозе 1920-30-х годов

This article analysеs hedonistic motifs of writers who act as protagonists in Russian-language metafictional prose of the 1920s–1930s. The material is taken from novels about the production of fiction: Leonid Leonov’s The Thief (1927), Konstantin Vaginov’s Labour and Days of Swistonov (1929), and Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair (1934) and The Gift (1937). It is claimed that “the pleasure of the text” which the writer as literary figure receives from the process of writing is habitually accompanied by elements of aggression and discomfort. From the hedonistic perspective, one might say that the writer as literary character in Russian metaprose of the 1920s and 1930s oscillates between two extremes: the pole of the agent, which carries pleasure/displeasure and thus alludes to the figure of the totalitarian leader, the deputy of God on earth; and the pole of the patient, who experiences happiness/despair like any representative of the human populace.

Twórczość Vladimira Nabokova – krajobrazy w zwierciadle synestezji

The text presented below contains an analysis of selected stories written by the famous Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov from the perspective of the phenomenon of synesthesia that he experienced throughout his life. Nabokov’s prose radiates colors, showing the writer’s extraordinary sensitivity to the often-complex effects of the influence of light on various surfaces. The intention of the authors of the article is primarily to direct the reader’s attention to the synesthetic moments of Nabokov’s prose and to scientific sources describing and explaining their dynamics, function and origin. Like a boomerang, returns the question about the state of mind of artists who create a unique reality, previously unknown and difficult to grasp for many people. The article is also a form of dialogue between literature and psychology, which in the case of such a complicated mind as Nabokov had, may be valuable.

Lolita x Six

Abstract: Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth had much in common, from an intense commitment to their art to an appreciation of so-called May-December relationships. Roth's personal library includes twenty-four Nabokov titles with six copies of Lolita (1955). His underlinings and marginal notes in two editions confirm his study of the book, which he also taught, and underscore his belief that "sex is but the ancilla of art," as Humbert Humbert states. But the influence of Nabokov goes beyond the single text. Elements of Nabokov exist in various Roth works. Lolita may have also provided license for Roth's uncensored sex in Portnoy's Complaint (1969), although Roth began to question whether art alone could vindicate immoral actions. Could art actually shelter the artist? Both authors attempted to distance themselves from their characters, but the public would not allow such separation. Nevertheless, the aesthetic of accumulation, sense of satire, and use of a self-conscious first-person narrator, added to the theme of sexual desire, cement the Nabokov-Roth nexus rooted in the numerous Nabokov titles found in the Philip Roth Personal Library. Abstract: Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth had much in common, from an intense commitment to their art to an appreciation of so-called May-December relationships. Roth's personal library includes twenty-four Nabokov titles with six copies of Lolita (1955). His underlinings and marginal notes in two editions confirm his study of the book, which he also taught, and underscore his belief that "sex is but the ancilla of art," as Humbert Humbert states. But the influence of Nabokov goes beyond the single text. Elements of Nabokov exist in various Roth works. Lolita may have also provided license for Roth's uncensored sex in Portnoy's Complaint (1969), although Roth began to question whether art alone could vindicate immoral actions. Could art actually shelter the artist? Both authors attempted to distance themselves from their characters, but the public would not allow such separation. Nevertheless, the aesthetic of accumulation, sense of satire, and use of a self-conscious first-person narrator, added to the theme of sexual desire, cement the Nabokov-Roth nexus rooted in the numerous Nabokov titles found in the Philip Roth Personal Library.

Художник-шпион в рассказе В. Набокова «Ассистент режиссера»: репрезентация сенсорного и эстетического опыта

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.

Дефекты оптики в лирике В. Набокова французского периода

The paper considers the poems of Vladimir Nabokov from the late 1930s. The lyrics reflect the writer’s experiments with the possibilities of language to convey the subjective experience of the artist. These texts referred to the French period are characterized by objectively “clear” optics. The poems “Oko” (“Oculus”) and “Chto za noch’ s pamyat’yu sluchilos’” (“What happened overnight”) utilize apophatic definitions and interrogative sentences to indicate the possibility of verbalizing the supersensual experience without linguistic constraints. The endeavor to express transcendental sensations through language invokes linguistic creativity and references to other literary works. The aesthetic framework established by Nabokov necessitates a state of reflective silence when perceiving his brilliant poetry, which is distinguished by the verbalization of unrecognized shades, sounds, and odors. Nabokov actualizes the metalinguistics ability of the artistic word to convey the specific sensorial characteristics of poetic inspiration and to possess its own referential memory. The study reveals how Nabokov employs references to his and other works to emphasize the artistic quality of optical aberrations. During the late 1930s, prior to transitioning to English, Nabokov focuses on the sensorial, mnemonic, and language mistakes and neutralizes the boundaries between the discourses, genres, epic, and lyrics. The wide literary context highlights the transgressive and conflict nature of V. Nabokov’s works of the French period. This background encompasses the early poems by Nabokov, works of contemporary émigré poets such as V. Hodasevich, G. Ivanov, G. Adamovich, and classical Russian poetry by A. Pushkin and V. Zhukovsky.

Pnin’s Unforgettable Digressions: Towards a Nabokovian Approach to the Unconscious

Defining the unconscious in a Husserlian manner as that which appears through reproductive acts of consciousness, this article attempts to investigate how Vladimir Nabokov tackles this theme in Pnin both as a stylist and as a storyteller. Nabokov understands literature as the art of language that imposes lived experiences on readers, and he achieves literary representations of the unconscious in Pnin by juxtaposing experiences containing tacit expectations that are incongruent with one another. Tracking the scenes where Pnin performs reproductive acts throughout the novel, it is found that the unconscious functions as a thematic pattern in Pnin and mirrors the protagonist’s progress in his quixotic war against cruelty and callousness in the world.

James Laughlin, American Modernism and Post World War II Welsh Writing in English

James Laughlin, who founded New Directions Press in 1936, had an early and enduring commitment to publishing innovative European authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Louis Ferdinand Céline, Hermann Hesse, García Lorca, Eugenio Montale, Vladimir Nabokov and Pablo Neruda. Laughlin’s international ambitions as a publisher extended to engaging with contemporary British writers and journal editors demonstrating a modernist dimension, evidenced in his extensive correspondence. This essay explores ways in which Laughlin furthered the New Direction Press publishing objectives within the post World War II English-language literary culture of Wales, including his interactions with Dylan Thomas, editors Keidrych Rhys and Gwyn Jones, and significant poets and fiction writers emerging in Wales during the 1940s. While Laughlin was informing Welsh writers and editors about New Directions Press authors and titles – and thus about manifestations of international modernism – Welsh writers and editors in turn educated Laughlin about the burgeoning English-language literary culture of Wales. 

Reading Like A Replicant: Blade Runner 2049, Pale Fire, and the Archival Embodiment of Literature

If androids dream of electric sheep, do replicants read analog novels? In the dystopian sci-fi world of Blade Runner 2049 (2017), literature plays a complex role. In particular, the film engages in a multi-leveled way with Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire (1962). A hardcover copy of the book appears in one scene, and it is quoted and covertly referenced in others. These appearances are like metafictive keys to a pattern of possible meanings, through which the film both embodies and reflects upon its method of archival replication. Translating between codex, screen, and holographic media, the film reanimates its source materials, dramatises the affinity between literary texts and embodied life, and suggests that literature may be a vector of resistance to techno-capitalist archival control.

Restoration of time: Henry Bergson and Vladimir Nabokov

The purpose of the study is to interpret the idea of “restoring time”, common to the texts of the Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov and the French intuitionist philosopher Henri Bergson. The concept of “restoration of time” in Vladimir Nabokov’s texts, viewing it through the lens of Henri Bergson’s philosophy is explored. According to Nabokov “time is essentially memory in the process of its unfolding”. Moreover, that memory itself is a dynamic and never-changing process. Therefore, the conventional notion that restoring the past is simply about retrieving previous “moments” does not hold true in Nabokov’s approach. As a result of studying the phenomenon, it is concluded that in Nabokov’s system the restoration of time (the past) should become the restoration of the very movement of our memories, constantly “flowing” to the present. The reconstruction of time (the past) should focus on capturing the very movement of our memories, which continuously flow from the past to the present. Bergson referred to this movement as the basis of “pure memory” phenomenon, understood as the constant pressure of memories on the present and as the essence of “duration”: genuine inner time, that cannot be divided into moments, but rather is an uninterrupted ever-growing stream of our impressions. Thus, the Bergson’s philosophy effectively addresses numerous Nabokovian issues, both peripheral and central.

Loison-Charles, J. (2023). Vladimir Nabokov as an Author-Translator: Writing and Translating between Russian, English and French. Bloomsbury Academic. http://doi.org/10.5040/9781350243316 (pp. 266)

Book review

Modes of ‟short-story-studies”: the individual community of the historical and literary narrative of Prince Mirsky and Vladimir Nabokov

The article discusses some aesthetic conclusions and methods of historical and literary generalisations in combination with Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky (hereinafter Prince Mirsky) and Vladimir Nabokov. The topic is contained in a professional methodological study of criticism of the Russian diaspora, in the aspect of their traditions and innovations. In order to clarify the most reliable and textually confirmed arguments, the following research methods are used: comparative-historical, conceptual, structural-semiotic and stylistic. The scientific novelty of the observations is due to the comparison of the scientific mythology of Prince Mirsky and Vadimir Nabokov (as literary personalities) and their categorical apparatus, in particular the parallels drawn in terms of the principles of critical analysis, the problems of speech worldview and the metaphorical style of their scientific thinking, both topical and insufficiently studied aspects of the creative heritage. The reader’s perception and personal assessment underlie their aesthetic verdicts, with methodological principle bringing together the positions of Prince Mirsky and Vladimir Nabokov, who analyse the evolution of aesthetic vision as a way of depicting life forms and reflecting our ideas about it in them. Prince Mirsky, just as well as later Vladimir Nabokov, assert an aesthetic approach, refusing to perceive literature as a sermon or a “photograph of contemporaneity, both appreciate the ontological meaning and ‟individual genius” in literature. As a result, a conclusion is made about the unique individual authors’ vision of the historical topology and conceptology of Russian literature as a semiotic category, the identification of its cultural codes, ‟landmarks”, ‟strokes”, ‟masterpieces”, which form the ‟cultural synthesis” of this unique phenomenon in the reader’s perception, expressed in a unique way, in other words, about the creation of the vice versa history of Russian literature (its modus vivendi).

Haloed Hallucinations

Abstract Among the most popular hagiographies throughout Eastern and Coptic Christianity, Athanasius’ Life of Antony has exercised profound influence upon Western visual and literary art, not least Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister. Querying the alleged originality of Nabokov’s “symbol of the Divine power,” this article examines Nabokov’s engagement with the Antonian hagiographic tradition—represented by Athanasius’ Life, Hieronymus Bosch’s Triptych of the Temptation of St. Anthony, and Gustave Flaubert’s Le Tentation de saint Antoine—to reveal the religious ground of protagonist Adam Krug’s saint-like identity and the novel’s metaliterary mysticism in the Lord’s figural descent upon an inclined beam of light at the end of Antony’s temptations. Providing a transgressive theological terroir for Nabokov to probe the porous varieties of the real, the Antonian sources of Krug’s “haloed hallucination” invite further reconsideration of Nabokov’s self-styled “indifference” to the Christian imaginary.