The History of the NOJ Website
In 2007 the Nabokov Online Journal was launched as an HTML website. The chromatic theme was a metallic blue and featured a central image of a razor blade, dividing the home page of the journal into two portals: English readers entered the site on the left and Russian readers on the right. The razor was meant as a pun on the journal’s acronym: "NOJ" in Russian ("НОЖ") means "knife" or "razor" and is also the title of “Britva” (“Бритва”), a short story written by Nabokov in 1926.
From 2009 until 2013 the journal was published under the auspices of Dalhousie University's Electronic Text Centre, and the main page used flash animation to create the following design, intended as a nostalgic, visual souvenir.
From 2009 until 2013 the journal was published under the auspices of Dalhousie University's Electronic Text Centre, and the main page used flash animation to create the following design, intended as a nostalgic, visual souvenir.
The concept behind this design was to gather various allusions to Nabokov's writings and arrange them in a playful, interactive way, reminding the user of the author's verbal and visual gaming principles. The result became a puzzle of sorts, reminiscent of Nabokov's work. In order to achieve this, we surveyed our colleagues and asked them to share what they considered the most memorable "scenes" from Nabokov's works. Then we selected a few of these key textual episodes and recreated them visually, using flash animation. Thus, one can discern a young Nabokov looking out of a train compartment, as described in his memoir Speak, Memory; watch the chess master Luzhin falling from a window at the climax of The Luzhin Defense; see the jam jars from the iconic short story “Signs and Symbols” and a calendar open to Nabokov's birthday; witness Chernyshevski's staged decapitation from The Gift, as well as read the opening quote from the original manuscript of the same novel...
In 2022, the website was updated again and we have incorporated some Nabokov's drawings of butterflies as a general theme.
Credit: Illustration by Vladimir Nabokov / Courtesy The Vladimir Nabokov Archive at the Berg Collection / New York Public Library / The Wylie Agency LLC. Portrait of Vladimir Nabokov on the home page by Carl Mydans, 1958 © Carl Mydans/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Sample page from the design used by NOJ, 2009-2013:
