The purpose of Matthew Roth’s (Messiah College) study, “The Composition of Nabokov’s Pale Fire,” is to bring to light some of the substantive and interesting features of the holograph manuscript (and subsequent, pre-publication revisions) of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, first published by G.P. Puntam’s Sons in 1962. The article provides a history of the novel’s composition, as well as transcriptions of substantive variants and omissions in the holograph manuscript, Nabokov’s pre-composition notes, and galley corrections. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
Kathryn James’s (University of Illinois at Chicago) article, “Checking In/Checking Out: Humbert’s Search for Authenticity in the Ubiquitous American Motel,” explores Humbert’s subtle obsession with the motels of the American roadside in Nabokov’s Lolita and considers their relevance in the deterioration of his aesthetic sensibility into a vulgar commercialism. Critics have long neglected the space of the motel in their readings of the novel, instead focusing their attention on the complementary road and consequently larger themes of travel as Humbert knots his way cross country. This paper, however, detours from the fast-paced transit of the highway system—the site of common critical commentary—and instead decelerates to a place of pause, a point of rest, in which the motel as object of the time-obsessed and aesthetically-minded Humbert comes into view. For Humbert, the motel with its chronotopic implications presents itself as the ideal space to pursue his aesthetic project of immortalizing Lolita; for scholars, the motel and its operation within a highly commercialized tourist environment awards a key insight into Humbert’s increasingly debased aestheticism. Indeed, the motel as it functions within the novel is more than just an inconsequential site to temporarily house his corrupt, illicit affair with Lolita. Rather, the American motel—in its endless and universally reproduced seriality and its standing as hollowed product of a kitschy consumer culture—must ultimately be read as undermining Humbert’s aesthetic ambition and instead preserving Lolita as degraded commodity, leaving a hopeless Humbert struggling to transcend the consumerist mentality qualifying his degraded aesthetics. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
Questions have arisen in recent years about the influence of the veteran Hollywood comedian, Charlie Chaplin, on Nabokov’s fiction. Going beyond the cinematic references cited by, amongst others, Alfred Appel Jr., the article by Barbara Wyllie (University College London), “‘My Age of Innocence Girl’ — Humbert, Chaplin, Lita and Lo,” reveals how Nabokov paid consistent and sometimes explicit homage to the silent film star, but also that Chaplin figures in Lolita as a piece of real-life contemporary America and as a complementary shadow to Humbert Humbert. At the same time, Chaplin’s relationship with Lita Grey, the girl who became his second wife at just sixteen, clearly resonates with that of Humbert Humbert and Lolita, whilst examination of the affinities between Nabokov’s Lo and Chaplin’s Lita generates new perspectives on Lolita’s world. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
Savely Senderovich (Cornell University) and Yelena Shvarts (Ithaca, NY), “Nabokov’s Short Story “The Potato Elf”: The Motif of Bamboozle”. Мотив надувания – один из самых частотных мотивов в набоковской прозе – рассматривается авторами статьи широко, от корыстных обманов и надувательствах всякого рода до тонких обманов природы и искусства. Обман – ключевое событие набоковского мира, возникающее во всех планах его произведений. Сендерович и Шварц учитывают символические функции обмана и полагают, что на словесном уровне он чаще всего выступает в виде мотива надувания или одурачивания – надувания и одурачивания материи. Набоков, как демонстрируют соавторы, занят надуванием материи. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
Tom Heisler’s paper, “Epic Mirage, Epic Ferocity in Nabokov’s Pnin,” advances the improbable thesis that Vladimir Nabokov wrote Pnin precisely as an epic, although what one supposes is the epic, even after multiple readings and re-readings, must be considered a diversion. The Homeric and Gogolian rambling comparison of Chapter Seven is read literally: as the Rosetta Stone of the novel. Nabokov’s epic fits recursively, in the manner of Chinese boxes, inside a triad of boxes bearing on a fictionalized biography and inside still another box, N—’s mirage epic, which amounts to a devastating disguise and which steeps the reader in all manner of “mythic parallels” and mocked epic conventions. The authentic epic, Nabokov’s own, features Pnin’s journey into a twentieth century hell in which fifty-five million human beings “monstrously” perished; and it connects the reader to Gogol’s Dead Souls, Homer’s The Odyssey, Joyce’s Ulysses, and the legacy of an ancient form. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
Chelsea Baumgarten’s (University of Illinois at Chicago) article, “‘The Free World of Timelessness’: Reimagining Time in Nabokov’s Pnin,” explores Nabokov’s rejection of reductive, conventional understandings of time and examines the more compelling temporality he puts forth in Pnin. Revering individual perception’s uniqueness to an extent many critics overlook, Nabokov challenges the traditional view that reality and time are objective, absolute entities and conceptualizes them as subjective phenomena grounded in human experience instead. While this personal temporal framework allows for liberating resurrections and reconfigurations that objective time prohibits, it still oppresses the individual and involves loss. Consequently, Nabokov ultimately turns to the ideal timelessness of literary form – a sublime realm into which Timofey Pnin, the novel’s protagonist, finally escapes. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
In her article, “‘The Mysteries of Mimicry’ and Nature as Supreme Art: Nabokov’s Intangible Nature,” Dr. Sabine Metzger (Universität Stuttgart) focuses on Nabokov’s statement: “The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction to me.” It has been noted by several critics that for Nabokov, mimicry establishes a link between nature and art, between the natural and the artificial. However, the interchangeability of these terms does not only prove to be a “key of Nabokov’s art”; above all it informs, as this paper will argue, his understanding of nature. Nabokov’s elaborations on mimicry characterize nature as supreme artist. Although understood as essentially artistic, Nabokov’s notion of nature cannot be identified as Romantic. Aesthetic and thus intangible, nature as supreme art keeps its “mysteries” and therefore maintains nature’s essential inaccessibility, as Heraclitus’ aphorism suggests: “nature likes to conceal herself,” phusis kruptesthai philei (Diels 1903, B123). NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
Roy Groen’s (Radboud University) article, “Circling around Hegel: Pens and Problems in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister,” develops the study of previous critics and commentators who have suggested a possible influence of the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on a range of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels. Through a closer reading of one of these novels, Bend Sinister, Groen tries to explore this suggestion in depth. The main part of his inquiry revolves around a remarkable coincidence (or is it?): it turns out Bend Sinister’s protagonist, fictional philosopher Adam Krug, has a historical namesake, Wilhelm Traugott Krug, a relatively well-known Neo-Kantian philosopher in Hegel’s time whose works are nowadays largely forgotten. Taking his starting point from the infamous philosophical polemic between Hegel and the historical Krug on the subject of the latter’s pen, the author offers a reading of Bend Sinister that gives one reasons to reconsider the terms in which the relationship between Nabokov and Hegel is commonly described. In the process, Groen also shows how a reading of Nabokov’s novel may contribute to some of the ongoing discussions concerning present-day dialectical philosophy. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
Alexander Dolinin’s (University of Wisconsin-Madison) article, “The Faults and Failures of Dilettantism: On the New Publications of Nabokov’s Drafts,” surveys some latest archival publications of Nabokov’s correspondence and unpublished prose. Professor Dolinin pinpoints and discusses serious errors in textology and commentary, focusing on Andrei Babikov’s publication of the text of the so-called “Pink Notebook” – the unfinished continuation of Nabokov’s last novel, The Gift. He demonstrates numerous flaws in the transcription of the manuscript as well as in annotations and disproves Babikov’s ungrounded hypothesis that the drafts were written in 1941 in the USA. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
The essay by Maxim D. Shrayer (Boston College), “Crimean Style – 2013 A Sentimental Journey to the Peninsula of Nabokov’s Youth,” in the form of a travelogue chronicles the author’s trip to Crimea in October 2013, less than six months before the annexation of Crimea by Russia. Shrayer intersperses various historical, anthropological and cultural observations with information about Vladimir Nabokov’s stay in Crimea, in 1917-1919. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
Kathryn James’s (University of Illinois at Chicago) article, “Checking In/Checking Out: Humbert’s Search for Authenticity in the Ubiquitous American Motel,” explores Humbert’s subtle obsession with the motels of the American roadside in Nabokov’s Lolita and considers their relevance in the deterioration of his aesthetic sensibility into a vulgar commercialism. Critics have long neglected the space of the motel in their readings of the novel, instead focusing their attention on the complementary road and consequently larger themes of travel as Humbert knots his way cross country. This paper, however, detours from the fast-paced transit of the highway system—the site of common critical commentary—and instead decelerates to a place of pause, a point of rest, in which the motel as object of the time-obsessed and aesthetically-minded Humbert comes into view. For Humbert, the motel with its chronotopic implications presents itself as the ideal space to pursue his aesthetic project of immortalizing Lolita; for scholars, the motel and its operation within a highly commercialized tourist environment awards a key insight into Humbert’s increasingly debased aestheticism. Indeed, the motel as it functions within the novel is more than just an inconsequential site to temporarily house his corrupt, illicit affair with Lolita. Rather, the American motel—in its endless and universally reproduced seriality and its standing as hollowed product of a kitschy consumer culture—must ultimately be read as undermining Humbert’s aesthetic ambition and instead preserving Lolita as degraded commodity, leaving a hopeless Humbert struggling to transcend the consumerist mentality qualifying his degraded aesthetics. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
Questions have arisen in recent years about the influence of the veteran Hollywood comedian, Charlie Chaplin, on Nabokov’s fiction. Going beyond the cinematic references cited by, amongst others, Alfred Appel Jr., the article by Barbara Wyllie (University College London), “‘My Age of Innocence Girl’ — Humbert, Chaplin, Lita and Lo,” reveals how Nabokov paid consistent and sometimes explicit homage to the silent film star, but also that Chaplin figures in Lolita as a piece of real-life contemporary America and as a complementary shadow to Humbert Humbert. At the same time, Chaplin’s relationship with Lita Grey, the girl who became his second wife at just sixteen, clearly resonates with that of Humbert Humbert and Lolita, whilst examination of the affinities between Nabokov’s Lo and Chaplin’s Lita generates new perspectives on Lolita’s world. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
Savely Senderovich (Cornell University) and Yelena Shvarts (Ithaca, NY), “Nabokov’s Short Story “The Potato Elf”: The Motif of Bamboozle”. Мотив надувания – один из самых частотных мотивов в набоковской прозе – рассматривается авторами статьи широко, от корыстных обманов и надувательствах всякого рода до тонких обманов природы и искусства. Обман – ключевое событие набоковского мира, возникающее во всех планах его произведений. Сендерович и Шварц учитывают символические функции обмана и полагают, что на словесном уровне он чаще всего выступает в виде мотива надувания или одурачивания – надувания и одурачивания материи. Набоков, как демонстрируют соавторы, занят надуванием материи. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
Tom Heisler’s paper, “Epic Mirage, Epic Ferocity in Nabokov’s Pnin,” advances the improbable thesis that Vladimir Nabokov wrote Pnin precisely as an epic, although what one supposes is the epic, even after multiple readings and re-readings, must be considered a diversion. The Homeric and Gogolian rambling comparison of Chapter Seven is read literally: as the Rosetta Stone of the novel. Nabokov’s epic fits recursively, in the manner of Chinese boxes, inside a triad of boxes bearing on a fictionalized biography and inside still another box, N—’s mirage epic, which amounts to a devastating disguise and which steeps the reader in all manner of “mythic parallels” and mocked epic conventions. The authentic epic, Nabokov’s own, features Pnin’s journey into a twentieth century hell in which fifty-five million human beings “monstrously” perished; and it connects the reader to Gogol’s Dead Souls, Homer’s The Odyssey, Joyce’s Ulysses, and the legacy of an ancient form. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
Chelsea Baumgarten’s (University of Illinois at Chicago) article, “‘The Free World of Timelessness’: Reimagining Time in Nabokov’s Pnin,” explores Nabokov’s rejection of reductive, conventional understandings of time and examines the more compelling temporality he puts forth in Pnin. Revering individual perception’s uniqueness to an extent many critics overlook, Nabokov challenges the traditional view that reality and time are objective, absolute entities and conceptualizes them as subjective phenomena grounded in human experience instead. While this personal temporal framework allows for liberating resurrections and reconfigurations that objective time prohibits, it still oppresses the individual and involves loss. Consequently, Nabokov ultimately turns to the ideal timelessness of literary form – a sublime realm into which Timofey Pnin, the novel’s protagonist, finally escapes. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
In her article, “‘The Mysteries of Mimicry’ and Nature as Supreme Art: Nabokov’s Intangible Nature,” Dr. Sabine Metzger (Universität Stuttgart) focuses on Nabokov’s statement: “The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction to me.” It has been noted by several critics that for Nabokov, mimicry establishes a link between nature and art, between the natural and the artificial. However, the interchangeability of these terms does not only prove to be a “key of Nabokov’s art”; above all it informs, as this paper will argue, his understanding of nature. Nabokov’s elaborations on mimicry characterize nature as supreme artist. Although understood as essentially artistic, Nabokov’s notion of nature cannot be identified as Romantic. Aesthetic and thus intangible, nature as supreme art keeps its “mysteries” and therefore maintains nature’s essential inaccessibility, as Heraclitus’ aphorism suggests: “nature likes to conceal herself,” phusis kruptesthai philei (Diels 1903, B123). NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
Roy Groen’s (Radboud University) article, “Circling around Hegel: Pens and Problems in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister,” develops the study of previous critics and commentators who have suggested a possible influence of the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on a range of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels. Through a closer reading of one of these novels, Bend Sinister, Groen tries to explore this suggestion in depth. The main part of his inquiry revolves around a remarkable coincidence (or is it?): it turns out Bend Sinister’s protagonist, fictional philosopher Adam Krug, has a historical namesake, Wilhelm Traugott Krug, a relatively well-known Neo-Kantian philosopher in Hegel’s time whose works are nowadays largely forgotten. Taking his starting point from the infamous philosophical polemic between Hegel and the historical Krug on the subject of the latter’s pen, the author offers a reading of Bend Sinister that gives one reasons to reconsider the terms in which the relationship between Nabokov and Hegel is commonly described. In the process, Groen also shows how a reading of Nabokov’s novel may contribute to some of the ongoing discussions concerning present-day dialectical philosophy. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
Alexander Dolinin’s (University of Wisconsin-Madison) article, “The Faults and Failures of Dilettantism: On the New Publications of Nabokov’s Drafts,” surveys some latest archival publications of Nabokov’s correspondence and unpublished prose. Professor Dolinin pinpoints and discusses serious errors in textology and commentary, focusing on Andrei Babikov’s publication of the text of the so-called “Pink Notebook” – the unfinished continuation of Nabokov’s last novel, The Gift. He demonstrates numerous flaws in the transcription of the manuscript as well as in annotations and disproves Babikov’s ungrounded hypothesis that the drafts were written in 1941 in the USA. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.
The essay by Maxim D. Shrayer (Boston College), “Crimean Style – 2013 A Sentimental Journey to the Peninsula of Nabokov’s Youth,” in the form of a travelogue chronicles the author’s trip to Crimea in October 2013, less than six months before the annexation of Crimea by Russia. Shrayer intersperses various historical, anthropological and cultural observations with information about Vladimir Nabokov’s stay in Crimea, in 1917-1919. NOJ, Vol. IX, 2015.