Maurice Couturier (University of Nice) shares with readers his memoir "A Forty-year Journey in Nabokovland." This is a chronicle of Couturier's long life with Nabokov's works and ghost, and therefore a continuation of the memoirs of his peasant childhood, Chronique de l'oubli (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2008). This is the tale, at once sad and funny, of a passionate love for a prestigious author who largely contributed to shaping the life of his exegete. It is also a sincere attempt on the part of the latter to reassess his relationship with other Nabokov specialists in the English-speaking world and to contemplate his contribution to Nabokov studies.
Vyacheslav Desyatov (The Altai State University) presents an article, "'On a Deserted, Wave-Swept Shore...': Akunin, Pelevin, and Nabokov in 2008," which is devoted to detecting Nabokovian allusions in the most recent writings of three leading Russian authors. Anatoly Brusnikin's novel, Devyatnyi Spas, is believed to have actually been written and published by B. Akunin. This literary mystification is to have been inspired by Nabokov who invented the phantom poet Vasily Shishkov. In addition, Desyatov asserts that the writers Pelevin and Akunin might be well-acquainted with and might thus engage modern Nabokov scholarship, in particular the volume of articles entitled Empire N. Nabokov and Heirs (2006).
As Juan Martinez (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) demonstrates in his work entitled, "A Fold of the Marquisette: Nabokov's Lepidoptery in Visual Media," in appropriating the signifiers of Nabokov's lepidopteral pursuits, graphic designers created a series of texts whose most salient messages borrow from traditional, folkloric associations of science to signify an integrated high aesthetic (apoliticism, highbrow seriousness, and an objective, decontextualized mandarin aestheticism). The designers reify Nabokov's extraordinary control over his own critical reception and public image. Nabokov is presented in these designs as a kind of mystic figure, a lepidopterist and a writer, since the designers conflate artistic creation and scientific inquiry, turning both creation and inquiry into mysteries. The writer paired with his butterfly studies becomes a larger-than-life character, one estranged from the ordinary. In doing so, these visual artifacts create a double myth, each design turning into a signifier of several concurrent messages - the neutral or disengaged aesthete, the precision of poetry, the excitement of science - that serve as a myth about our culture.
Joshua Light O'Dell (University of Colorado-Boulder), who finds Nabokov's rich visual imagery and style particularly suited to cinematic interpretations, contributes a short screenplay adapted from Chapter Nine of Nabokov's Speak, Memory. The screenplay pays special attention to the relationship between Nabokov and his father.
Laurence Petit's (Central Connecticut State University) article is entitled "Speak, Photographs? Visual Transparency and Verbal Opacity in Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory." Like many contemporary writers, Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory explores the destabilizing interaction between visual and verbal codes in an autobiographical work combining text and photographic image. The originality of this book, however, is that, unlike so many other postmodern works, the supposedly truthful photographic image does not hold its promise and challenges perception and representation. In Speak, Memory, photographs are indeed presented as a faithful, transparent window into the past. What obfuscates this autobiographical project, however, is the opacity of the reminiscing, or anamnestic discourse on those photographs, in particular that which is contained in their accompanying captions. Borrowing from critics such as Barthes, Doubrovsky, Harvey Rugg, and others, this essay examines how Nabokov in Speak, Memory playfully subverts his own autobiography, or photobiography, through an idiosyncratic use of text and image that not only sheds light on his condition as an exile, but also challenges his readers' expectations in typically postmodern, as well as Nabokovian, fashion.
Anika S. Quayle (University of Melbourne) contributes an article, "Lolita Is Dolores Haze: The 'Real' Child and the 'Real' Body in Lolita." The dominant trend in Lolita criticism, according to Quayle, is to read Humbert as 'blind' to the real Lolita by a 'solipsistic' image of her that is a product of his artistic imagination. It is commonly argued that Humbert sees her as, for example, a second incarnation of his childhood love, Annabel Leigh, or as a sexualized demonic nymphet. There are, however, clear indications within the novel that Humbert does not truly see Lolita in these terms, and the argument that Humbert is 'blind' to Lolita is further belied by the fact that the real Lolita, as accurately perceived by him, is a central and constant presence in his narrative. This tendency to read Humbert as obsessed with an image from his imagination rather than a 'real' girl has the effect of obscuring Humbert's more prosaic obsession with Lolita's physical appeal; it thus also has the effect of obscuring the novel's socially highly relevant comment on the 'objectification' of women.
Matthew Roth (Messiah College) and Tiffany DeRewal (Villanova University) offer a new reading of the novel in their study, "John Shade's Duplicate Selves: An Alternative Shadean Theory of Pale Fire." Brian Boyd and others have rightly noted the intricate web that connects Pale Fire's three main characters. While Boyd has chosen to account for these connections via the supernatural, this article posits instead that Kinbote and Gradus are secondary, semi-autonomous personalities of John Shade. Kinbote arrives on the scene via John Shade's "heart attack" and finally succeeds in becoming the primary personality at the moment of Shade's physical demise on July 21, 1959. This conclusion is merited not only by a close reading of Pale Fire itself, but by Nabokov's interest in the Double theme, as seen in Stevenson, Dostoevsky, and in his own novels, especially The Eye and Despair. Moreover, Nabokov's unpublished notes regarding Donald West's Psychical Research Today reveal his interest in dual personalities and, in particular, the famous case of Ansel Bourne, a possible model for John Shade.
Alexey Vdovin's (University of Tartu, Estonia) article-commentary "To the Sources of Nabokov's The Gift Fourth Chapter" establishes the sources of a few marked quotations from Chernyshevski's Biography which have not been identified by commentators. They are quotations from M. Saltykov-Shchedrin, N. Shelgunov's article "A Literary Property" (ascribed to Chernyshevski by mistake), M. Lemke's article from the Dobroliubov's Complete Works, and A. Volynski's book, Russian Critics. The researcher suggests that Russian Critics (1896) served as the major source of Nabokov's conception of "aesthetic trial" for Chernyshevski in The Gift. Both Volynski's style and his historical and critical methods influenced Nabokov's principles of work with documentary material and mode of narration in the fourth chapter of his novel.
Annalisa Volpone's (University of Perugia) paper, "'See the Web of the World': the (Hyper) Textual Plagiarism in Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Nabokov's Pale Fire," proposes a comparison between James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire in terms of a textual dialogue, which according to Bakhtin is incipient in the genre of the novel itself. In particular, Volpone suggests a reading of the texts from a postmodernist point of view. The way Joyce and Nabokov refer to the past and to literary tradition seems to anticipate some of the most prominent issues of postmodernism, such as the concept of plagiarism. Furthermore, they continuously deconstruct the novel as a genre in the author-reader relation, in the way characters are presented and in the peculiarities of the language, which often turns into an idiolect that is resistant to any decoding. Annalisa Volpone tries to demonstrate that there is an indissoluble link between Finnegans Wake and Pale Fire that goes beyond a simple intertextual exercise. This relationship strongly affects the very structure of Nabokov's novel, allowing the reader to consider new patterns of meaning.
Vyacheslav Desyatov (The Altai State University) presents an article, "'On a Deserted, Wave-Swept Shore...': Akunin, Pelevin, and Nabokov in 2008," which is devoted to detecting Nabokovian allusions in the most recent writings of three leading Russian authors. Anatoly Brusnikin's novel, Devyatnyi Spas, is believed to have actually been written and published by B. Akunin. This literary mystification is to have been inspired by Nabokov who invented the phantom poet Vasily Shishkov. In addition, Desyatov asserts that the writers Pelevin and Akunin might be well-acquainted with and might thus engage modern Nabokov scholarship, in particular the volume of articles entitled Empire N. Nabokov and Heirs (2006).
As Juan Martinez (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) demonstrates in his work entitled, "A Fold of the Marquisette: Nabokov's Lepidoptery in Visual Media," in appropriating the signifiers of Nabokov's lepidopteral pursuits, graphic designers created a series of texts whose most salient messages borrow from traditional, folkloric associations of science to signify an integrated high aesthetic (apoliticism, highbrow seriousness, and an objective, decontextualized mandarin aestheticism). The designers reify Nabokov's extraordinary control over his own critical reception and public image. Nabokov is presented in these designs as a kind of mystic figure, a lepidopterist and a writer, since the designers conflate artistic creation and scientific inquiry, turning both creation and inquiry into mysteries. The writer paired with his butterfly studies becomes a larger-than-life character, one estranged from the ordinary. In doing so, these visual artifacts create a double myth, each design turning into a signifier of several concurrent messages - the neutral or disengaged aesthete, the precision of poetry, the excitement of science - that serve as a myth about our culture.
Joshua Light O'Dell (University of Colorado-Boulder), who finds Nabokov's rich visual imagery and style particularly suited to cinematic interpretations, contributes a short screenplay adapted from Chapter Nine of Nabokov's Speak, Memory. The screenplay pays special attention to the relationship between Nabokov and his father.
Laurence Petit's (Central Connecticut State University) article is entitled "Speak, Photographs? Visual Transparency and Verbal Opacity in Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory." Like many contemporary writers, Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory explores the destabilizing interaction between visual and verbal codes in an autobiographical work combining text and photographic image. The originality of this book, however, is that, unlike so many other postmodern works, the supposedly truthful photographic image does not hold its promise and challenges perception and representation. In Speak, Memory, photographs are indeed presented as a faithful, transparent window into the past. What obfuscates this autobiographical project, however, is the opacity of the reminiscing, or anamnestic discourse on those photographs, in particular that which is contained in their accompanying captions. Borrowing from critics such as Barthes, Doubrovsky, Harvey Rugg, and others, this essay examines how Nabokov in Speak, Memory playfully subverts his own autobiography, or photobiography, through an idiosyncratic use of text and image that not only sheds light on his condition as an exile, but also challenges his readers' expectations in typically postmodern, as well as Nabokovian, fashion.
Anika S. Quayle (University of Melbourne) contributes an article, "Lolita Is Dolores Haze: The 'Real' Child and the 'Real' Body in Lolita." The dominant trend in Lolita criticism, according to Quayle, is to read Humbert as 'blind' to the real Lolita by a 'solipsistic' image of her that is a product of his artistic imagination. It is commonly argued that Humbert sees her as, for example, a second incarnation of his childhood love, Annabel Leigh, or as a sexualized demonic nymphet. There are, however, clear indications within the novel that Humbert does not truly see Lolita in these terms, and the argument that Humbert is 'blind' to Lolita is further belied by the fact that the real Lolita, as accurately perceived by him, is a central and constant presence in his narrative. This tendency to read Humbert as obsessed with an image from his imagination rather than a 'real' girl has the effect of obscuring Humbert's more prosaic obsession with Lolita's physical appeal; it thus also has the effect of obscuring the novel's socially highly relevant comment on the 'objectification' of women.
Matthew Roth (Messiah College) and Tiffany DeRewal (Villanova University) offer a new reading of the novel in their study, "John Shade's Duplicate Selves: An Alternative Shadean Theory of Pale Fire." Brian Boyd and others have rightly noted the intricate web that connects Pale Fire's three main characters. While Boyd has chosen to account for these connections via the supernatural, this article posits instead that Kinbote and Gradus are secondary, semi-autonomous personalities of John Shade. Kinbote arrives on the scene via John Shade's "heart attack" and finally succeeds in becoming the primary personality at the moment of Shade's physical demise on July 21, 1959. This conclusion is merited not only by a close reading of Pale Fire itself, but by Nabokov's interest in the Double theme, as seen in Stevenson, Dostoevsky, and in his own novels, especially The Eye and Despair. Moreover, Nabokov's unpublished notes regarding Donald West's Psychical Research Today reveal his interest in dual personalities and, in particular, the famous case of Ansel Bourne, a possible model for John Shade.
Alexey Vdovin's (University of Tartu, Estonia) article-commentary "To the Sources of Nabokov's The Gift Fourth Chapter" establishes the sources of a few marked quotations from Chernyshevski's Biography which have not been identified by commentators. They are quotations from M. Saltykov-Shchedrin, N. Shelgunov's article "A Literary Property" (ascribed to Chernyshevski by mistake), M. Lemke's article from the Dobroliubov's Complete Works, and A. Volynski's book, Russian Critics. The researcher suggests that Russian Critics (1896) served as the major source of Nabokov's conception of "aesthetic trial" for Chernyshevski in The Gift. Both Volynski's style and his historical and critical methods influenced Nabokov's principles of work with documentary material and mode of narration in the fourth chapter of his novel.
Annalisa Volpone's (University of Perugia) paper, "'See the Web of the World': the (Hyper) Textual Plagiarism in Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Nabokov's Pale Fire," proposes a comparison between James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire in terms of a textual dialogue, which according to Bakhtin is incipient in the genre of the novel itself. In particular, Volpone suggests a reading of the texts from a postmodernist point of view. The way Joyce and Nabokov refer to the past and to literary tradition seems to anticipate some of the most prominent issues of postmodernism, such as the concept of plagiarism. Furthermore, they continuously deconstruct the novel as a genre in the author-reader relation, in the way characters are presented and in the peculiarities of the language, which often turns into an idiolect that is resistant to any decoding. Annalisa Volpone tries to demonstrate that there is an indissoluble link between Finnegans Wake and Pale Fire that goes beyond a simple intertextual exercise. This relationship strongly affects the very structure of Nabokov's novel, allowing the reader to consider new patterns of meaning.
