Alexander Moudrov’s "Nabokov and the Puritans: Echoes of Early American Crime Literature in Lolita" argues that while Nabokov did not express much appreciation for early American writers, apparent parallels between colonial crime literature and the structure of Lolita suggest his familiarity with literary conventions established by his American predecessors. Seventeenth-century American writers created a lasting didactic tradition of writing about crime. They encouraged their compatriots’ interest in scandalous revelations and confessions as long as examples of such crimes were used as occasions for moralizing. In the nineteenth century, another generation of crime writers, with George Thompson as a notable example, challenged that tradition with new forms of crime fiction and journalism that relied on readers’ appreciation of titillating details rather than didacticism. Tensions between two forms of crime literature created an enduring debate about appropriate methods of writing about crime. The debate centered on the question whether readers are expected to enjoy or learn something socially relevant from crime stories. Nabokov’s awareness of that debate is apparent in the structure of Lolita, which, as this essay demonstrates, appropriates many conventions of early American crime literature.
According to Sabine Metzger (Universität Stuttgart) in her "Dark Chambers: Nabokov and the Second Sense," while the visual in Nabokov’s oeuvre has gained much scholarly attention, sound has been relegated to a relatively silent existence within the Nabokovian sensorium, and thus to the status of the second, or – to use Daniel Barenboim’s phrase – “neglected” sense that is assigned to it by the Western tradition in which “thinking has been thought in terms of seeing.” Although Nabokov situates himself within this tradition by claiming “I think in images,” his writings are highly sonorous and address hearing as much as sight, alone on the account of the fact that his language, rich in alliterations, evokes the voces paginarum, “the voices of the page,” which turn reading simultaneously into a listening. As this paper will argue, Nabokov’s novels explore sound in all its dimensions. By “dark chambers” – such as nocturnal rooms, Albinus’ blindness, Cincinnatus’ prison cell – he creates acousmatic situations which dissociate sounds from their visible sources and foreground the akoumenal. “Sounds unseen” indicate not only Nabokov’s heightened awareness of the peculiarities of sound and hearing as such; they provide the starting point of his inquiry into sounds’ physical properties, and into its aesthetic and metaphysical implications that challenges ocularcentrism by giving the second sense what it is due.
Irene Masing-Delic’s (The Ohio State University) article "Bloodied Eyes, Dancing Dolls, and Other Hoffmannian Motifs in Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave" discusses the genre of KQK as a mixture of the fantastic and realistic in the Hoffmannian tradition of Romantic ambiguity. Specifically, it demonstrates Nabokov’s engagement with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale “The Sandman” (“Der Sandmann,” 1816), the tale Freud uses as illustration of his theories about “The Uncanny.” Like Nathanael of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story, the “Knave” of Nabokov’s novel King, Queen, Knave (1968, Korol’, Dama, Valet, 1928), Franz Bubenkopf, is linked with deceptive optics. The article explores how the Hoffmannian motifs add complexity to the “cardboard characters” of the title. Since Freud’s famous essay “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche,” 1919) discusses Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” in some detail, stating that the motif of losing one’s eyes is “a substitute for the fear of castration” and Nabokov, in his “Foreword” to KQK, warns “resolute” Freudians not to apply their theories to his novel, the article also raises the question whether Freud’s essay is parodied in it.
Olga Dmitrienko (St. Petersburg State University) in her article, “F. Goya’s Caprichos as an Intermedial Source of Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading,” examines intertextual and intermedial layers of the novel. Intermediality is the translation from one language of art into another within one culture, or integration of different elements of art in monomedial or multimedial text. According to Dmitrienko’s hypothesis, the series of Goya’s Caprichos etchings produced significant intermedial referents to Invitation to a Beheading. Goya’s etchings came into the limelight of Russian literature in the 1910s, and the Nabokovs’ home library in St. Petersburg had an album of his works. Nabokov himself mentions the artist’s name in one of his letters to his wife, Vera Nabokov.
In “The Beneficial Role of Jews in Vladimir Nabokov’s Life and Career,” Gavriel Shapiro (Cornell University) discusses many individuals of Jewish origin and their role in assisting Nabokov at crucial moments of his life and in promoting his literary career. Among those, there were Russian Jews, whom Nabokov encountered in London, Berlin and Paris, as well as West European and American Jews—university colleagues, editors and publishers—who contributed a great deal to his success as a writer. Shapiro concludes the article with an account of Nabokov’s unrealized visit to Israel and with ample evidence of his great fondness for the Jewish State.
Drawing on archival research and published documents, Marianne Cotugno’s (Miami University) article "'We’re Just Putting It in Our Files:' Lolita at the Cincinnati Public Library" looks at what Brian Boyd called one of the "few flickers of outrage" about Lolita after its American publication by Putnam in 1958 when the Cincinnati Public Library "banned" the book from its shelves. The Lolita controversy throws into relief the complex history of obscenity legislation on a local, state, and national level and illustrates that Nabokov's concerns prior to his novel's American publication were well-founded.
According to Sabine Metzger (Universität Stuttgart) in her "Dark Chambers: Nabokov and the Second Sense," while the visual in Nabokov’s oeuvre has gained much scholarly attention, sound has been relegated to a relatively silent existence within the Nabokovian sensorium, and thus to the status of the second, or – to use Daniel Barenboim’s phrase – “neglected” sense that is assigned to it by the Western tradition in which “thinking has been thought in terms of seeing.” Although Nabokov situates himself within this tradition by claiming “I think in images,” his writings are highly sonorous and address hearing as much as sight, alone on the account of the fact that his language, rich in alliterations, evokes the voces paginarum, “the voices of the page,” which turn reading simultaneously into a listening. As this paper will argue, Nabokov’s novels explore sound in all its dimensions. By “dark chambers” – such as nocturnal rooms, Albinus’ blindness, Cincinnatus’ prison cell – he creates acousmatic situations which dissociate sounds from their visible sources and foreground the akoumenal. “Sounds unseen” indicate not only Nabokov’s heightened awareness of the peculiarities of sound and hearing as such; they provide the starting point of his inquiry into sounds’ physical properties, and into its aesthetic and metaphysical implications that challenges ocularcentrism by giving the second sense what it is due.
Irene Masing-Delic’s (The Ohio State University) article "Bloodied Eyes, Dancing Dolls, and Other Hoffmannian Motifs in Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave" discusses the genre of KQK as a mixture of the fantastic and realistic in the Hoffmannian tradition of Romantic ambiguity. Specifically, it demonstrates Nabokov’s engagement with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale “The Sandman” (“Der Sandmann,” 1816), the tale Freud uses as illustration of his theories about “The Uncanny.” Like Nathanael of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story, the “Knave” of Nabokov’s novel King, Queen, Knave (1968, Korol’, Dama, Valet, 1928), Franz Bubenkopf, is linked with deceptive optics. The article explores how the Hoffmannian motifs add complexity to the “cardboard characters” of the title. Since Freud’s famous essay “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche,” 1919) discusses Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” in some detail, stating that the motif of losing one’s eyes is “a substitute for the fear of castration” and Nabokov, in his “Foreword” to KQK, warns “resolute” Freudians not to apply their theories to his novel, the article also raises the question whether Freud’s essay is parodied in it.
Olga Dmitrienko (St. Petersburg State University) in her article, “F. Goya’s Caprichos as an Intermedial Source of Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading,” examines intertextual and intermedial layers of the novel. Intermediality is the translation from one language of art into another within one culture, or integration of different elements of art in monomedial or multimedial text. According to Dmitrienko’s hypothesis, the series of Goya’s Caprichos etchings produced significant intermedial referents to Invitation to a Beheading. Goya’s etchings came into the limelight of Russian literature in the 1910s, and the Nabokovs’ home library in St. Petersburg had an album of his works. Nabokov himself mentions the artist’s name in one of his letters to his wife, Vera Nabokov.
In “The Beneficial Role of Jews in Vladimir Nabokov’s Life and Career,” Gavriel Shapiro (Cornell University) discusses many individuals of Jewish origin and their role in assisting Nabokov at crucial moments of his life and in promoting his literary career. Among those, there were Russian Jews, whom Nabokov encountered in London, Berlin and Paris, as well as West European and American Jews—university colleagues, editors and publishers—who contributed a great deal to his success as a writer. Shapiro concludes the article with an account of Nabokov’s unrealized visit to Israel and with ample evidence of his great fondness for the Jewish State.
Drawing on archival research and published documents, Marianne Cotugno’s (Miami University) article "'We’re Just Putting It in Our Files:' Lolita at the Cincinnati Public Library" looks at what Brian Boyd called one of the "few flickers of outrage" about Lolita after its American publication by Putnam in 1958 when the Cincinnati Public Library "banned" the book from its shelves. The Lolita controversy throws into relief the complex history of obscenity legislation on a local, state, and national level and illustrates that Nabokov's concerns prior to his novel's American publication were well-founded.
