As Agnès Edel-Roy reminds in her “Going Beyond: Nabokov’s French Exile,” Nabokov declared in 1966: “I am a very non-typical émigré who doubts that a typical émigré exists.” This unique stance was confirmed by the contentious reception of his Russian novels between 1930 and 1940, when Russian émigrés in Paris faulted Nabokov for his lack of “Russianness,” while Soviet writers reproached his uselessness and Sartre condemned his lack of roots. In the French press, Nabokov’s defenders emphasized his Western nature and linked his style with French art and Pushkin “the Frenchman.” In 1936, Nabokov wrote an autobiographical narrative in French entitled “Mademoiselle O,” which inverts the problematic figure of the Russian émigré in order to probe its universality, and inaugurates the author’s new conception of the power of art. By enacting a new “distribution of the perceptible” (Jacques Rancière), Nabokov experiences the full force of resurrection, transfiguration and transformation that can be brought about by art, the only shared space, or common world, where the traces of the émigré’s survival cannot be erased, and where the boundaries of space, time and death are abolished.
Evgeny Soshkin’s (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) article offers an intertextual analysis of Nabokov’s short story “The Potato Elf” (1924). The author argues that the key subtext which helps to reconstruct the metaplot of this story is Wilhelm Hauff’s The Dwarf Nose (1826). Based on this hypothesis and taking into account a number of presumptive additional subtexts, the author suggests an integrated interpretation of Nabokov’s story.
In their article, “The Problems of Translating Nabokov’s Pnin into Persian,” Gholamreza Shafiee-Sabet (independent scholar) and Atefeh Rabei (Concordia University) focus on the Bahman Khosravi’s Persian translation of Pnin. Drawing on Eugene Nida’s model of translation, they compare the English text and its Persian translation and demonstrate that in the stages of analysis, transfer and restructuring in the process of translation, the translator has failed.
Although Nabokov’s The Defense has been an object of study for a long time, Shun’ichiro Akikusa suggests a different possible reading in his essay, “What Made Luzhin Commit Suicide? Nabokov’s The Defense as a Moral Game.” So far, as Akikusa states, the methods of analyzing this novel by Nabokov have followed certain patterns, such as the analogy to chess, the theme of the “otherworld” and the repetition of words. In this sense, the novel is regarded as typically “Nabokovian” in the context of Nabokov studies. Yet, such clichéd approaches can divert our attention from the core of the novel. The purpose of this paper is to reread The Defense from the point of view of the father-child relationship, and shed light upon the novel’s moral aspect. From this point of view, this novel can be read as a “moral game” between writer and reader. Nabokov puts the readers’ ability to attend to Luzhin’s tenderness to the test.
In his essay “Ada: Make-believe Stories” Mikołaj Wiśniewski (University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland) analyzes Ada’s peculiar merging of fantasy and reality, truth and fiction, which has prompted some critics to see Nabokov’s late masterpiece – with its linguistic charades, the parodying of literary genres, the radical undermining of the narrator’s reliability – as an overblown formal gimmick, a tour de force of postmodern indeterminacy. Wiśniewski sets Ada’s formal playfulness in the larger context of Nabokov’s life-long fascination with the problem of creative memory – of artistic remembrance which, as Ada herself puts it, always contains the subjective, distorting element of “otsiebiatina” (that which is added “oт себя” – “from oneself”), and thus forms the life-protecting, death-defying lie of art or imagination. In Ada, therefore, Nabokov seems to subscribe to the belief – expressed in one of Italo Calvino’s novels - that “literature’s worth lies in its power of mystification, in mystification it has its truth.”
In her essay “Nabokov’s Duels with Literature”, Violeta Stojmenovic traces the duel motif in two of Nabokov’s early stories (“Podlets” and “Lebeda”), The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Ada, or Ardor, analyzing its transformation from a literary into a meta-literary and meta-narrative motif. While in Nabokov’s stories from the 1930s the motif gave the narrator occasion to concentrate on the internal world of his characters and on issues of (in)authenticity, in the novels, the duels are presented as symbolic encounters between remote moments in time and, eventually, as a model for the relationship of human consciousness with time. The different duels in Nabokov’s oeuvre, in step with the changes in his work and relations toward literary and cultural traditions, draw this motif out of a culturally recognizable context. It loses its referential function and serves as a nostalgic and metatextual commentary, as well as a means of shifting from representation of specific cultural phenomena to representations of representations.
Claudio Sansone’s (University of Chicago) brief note examines a possible connection between Psalm 38 of the King James Bible, and the ‘opening’ sentence Lolita, suggesting that the echo is meant to function as a subtle recasting of the hint towards Lolita’s fate in the 'Foreword'. Side by side comparison of the King James and the English Lolita, as well as the Hebrew Bible and the Russian Lolita has underscored the lexical and thematic resonances that suggest Nabokov intended to imply that, from the very first moment, but also in certain later manifest statements and latent attitudes, Humbert’s narrative might be read as an elegy to a lost child.
Evgeny Soshkin’s (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) article offers an intertextual analysis of Nabokov’s short story “The Potato Elf” (1924). The author argues that the key subtext which helps to reconstruct the metaplot of this story is Wilhelm Hauff’s The Dwarf Nose (1826). Based on this hypothesis and taking into account a number of presumptive additional subtexts, the author suggests an integrated interpretation of Nabokov’s story.
In their article, “The Problems of Translating Nabokov’s Pnin into Persian,” Gholamreza Shafiee-Sabet (independent scholar) and Atefeh Rabei (Concordia University) focus on the Bahman Khosravi’s Persian translation of Pnin. Drawing on Eugene Nida’s model of translation, they compare the English text and its Persian translation and demonstrate that in the stages of analysis, transfer and restructuring in the process of translation, the translator has failed.
Although Nabokov’s The Defense has been an object of study for a long time, Shun’ichiro Akikusa suggests a different possible reading in his essay, “What Made Luzhin Commit Suicide? Nabokov’s The Defense as a Moral Game.” So far, as Akikusa states, the methods of analyzing this novel by Nabokov have followed certain patterns, such as the analogy to chess, the theme of the “otherworld” and the repetition of words. In this sense, the novel is regarded as typically “Nabokovian” in the context of Nabokov studies. Yet, such clichéd approaches can divert our attention from the core of the novel. The purpose of this paper is to reread The Defense from the point of view of the father-child relationship, and shed light upon the novel’s moral aspect. From this point of view, this novel can be read as a “moral game” between writer and reader. Nabokov puts the readers’ ability to attend to Luzhin’s tenderness to the test.
In his essay “Ada: Make-believe Stories” Mikołaj Wiśniewski (University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland) analyzes Ada’s peculiar merging of fantasy and reality, truth and fiction, which has prompted some critics to see Nabokov’s late masterpiece – with its linguistic charades, the parodying of literary genres, the radical undermining of the narrator’s reliability – as an overblown formal gimmick, a tour de force of postmodern indeterminacy. Wiśniewski sets Ada’s formal playfulness in the larger context of Nabokov’s life-long fascination with the problem of creative memory – of artistic remembrance which, as Ada herself puts it, always contains the subjective, distorting element of “otsiebiatina” (that which is added “oт себя” – “from oneself”), and thus forms the life-protecting, death-defying lie of art or imagination. In Ada, therefore, Nabokov seems to subscribe to the belief – expressed in one of Italo Calvino’s novels - that “literature’s worth lies in its power of mystification, in mystification it has its truth.”
In her essay “Nabokov’s Duels with Literature”, Violeta Stojmenovic traces the duel motif in two of Nabokov’s early stories (“Podlets” and “Lebeda”), The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Ada, or Ardor, analyzing its transformation from a literary into a meta-literary and meta-narrative motif. While in Nabokov’s stories from the 1930s the motif gave the narrator occasion to concentrate on the internal world of his characters and on issues of (in)authenticity, in the novels, the duels are presented as symbolic encounters between remote moments in time and, eventually, as a model for the relationship of human consciousness with time. The different duels in Nabokov’s oeuvre, in step with the changes in his work and relations toward literary and cultural traditions, draw this motif out of a culturally recognizable context. It loses its referential function and serves as a nostalgic and metatextual commentary, as well as a means of shifting from representation of specific cultural phenomena to representations of representations.
Claudio Sansone’s (University of Chicago) brief note examines a possible connection between Psalm 38 of the King James Bible, and the ‘opening’ sentence Lolita, suggesting that the echo is meant to function as a subtle recasting of the hint towards Lolita’s fate in the 'Foreword'. Side by side comparison of the King James and the English Lolita, as well as the Hebrew Bible and the Russian Lolita has underscored the lexical and thematic resonances that suggest Nabokov intended to imply that, from the very first moment, but also in certain later manifest statements and latent attitudes, Humbert’s narrative might be read as an elegy to a lost child.
