Lara Delage-Toriel, President of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, is happy to announce the following Nabokov panel at next year's MLA Convention:
Panel Title: "Playing with/for Time: Nabokov's Persistent Images"
Eric Eklund (PhD candidate, Nottingham University), "Ever Moving Repose: All Space, All Time, and the Infinite Gaze of Sudarg’s Triptych"
George Mather (DPhil candidate, Oxford University), "'Thematic Designs': Nabokov Persistent and Purposive"
Dear NOJ friends, members of the Editorial Board and the authors of Vol. XIII:
I would like to thank you all for your wonderful cooperation and for making this issue of the Nabokov Online Journal possible - despite the unfolding crisis! In addition to launching the new issue, we've made our entire digital archive free. You are welcome to forward this link to peers and friends, and to all those who might find solace these days in reading VN or anything related to his legacy: http://www.nabokovonline.com/news.html
We are humbled and grateful to The Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation for their generous support.
You are invited to submit a NOTE to The Nabokovian. The deadline for submissions to the NOTES section for this (unusual) spring is May 1.
For its next session at the MLA Convention 2021 (7-10 January, Toronto), the IVNS welcomes proposals on the following theme:
Playing with/for Time: Nabokov's Persistent Images
Nabokov created persistent images (visual and other), which mark readers' minds not unlike the phenomenon of retinal persistence. How do such images survive, confer timelessness to his fiction, or anchor it in a specific temporality?
Please send a 250-word abstract to Lara Delage-Toriel (ldelage@unistra.fr) and a short bio by March 24th, 2020.
The International Vladimir Nabokov Society (IVNS) is currently seeking submissions for its 2020 Prizes, generously funded by the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation, for excellence in undergraduate and graduate-level work, published articles, and books. Work can be self-nominated. The deadline for nominations is April 30th.
Founded in 1978, the IVNS exists to promote the study and appreciation of Nabokov's work and awards annual prizes for outstanding essays and books in Nabokov studies.
Dear Members of International Vladimir Nabokov Society:
Happy New Year to you all and I hope this message finds you well. May 2020 bring us all only happy tidings.
It is the time of year to renew our IVNS memberships. Those of you who joined the Society or renewed your memberships since November 1, 2019, don’t need to do anything. Your memberships are active until the end of December 2020.
In everyone else’s case, the time has come to renew your membership. Please go to the link below to complete your renewal:
We are pleased to announce that Siggy Frank, from Nottingham University (UK), has just been elected vice-president of the IVNS by its members. Lara Delage-Toriel, from Strasbourg University (France), is now president of the IVNS. She wishes to thank our outgoing president, Thomas Karshan (East Anglia, UK), for his efficient and levelheaded dedication to the IVNS during his mandate as president.
As we enter a new decade of the 21st century, we hope to continue to promote research on and knowledge of Nabokov's work to the best of our capacities, and gladly welcome suggestions and projects which might support the IVNS's mission. Please don't hesitate to get in touch with us.
Dear Nabokovians,
The Nabokov secondary bibliography is now ready for use. It has been a difficult task importing the old Zembla secondary bibliography, which was up to date to 2009, into the system. This is done, and ready for use, and now we want you both to use the bibliography and to bring it up to the present.
We very much count on our users to correct and augment the bibliography, which is decidedly a work in progress, and, to remain useful, will always be so.
The Annotations to Ada 2-1 are now ready and available here. Enjoy! Thanks as usual to Steve Blackwell for casting an attentive and imaginative editorial eye over this instalment. The Annotations to Ada 43-1 will shortly become available on AdaOnline with hyperlinks and illustrations added.
Brian Boyd
You probably realize that Think, Write, Speak has published in both the US and the UK, but you may not know that it was named as a Book of the Year in the TLS by William Boyd (no relation) and Zinovny Zinik (ditto). Indeed it was the only English-language work to be chosen by more than one writer; the book of the year list was even headed "Think, Read, Speak." So unless you buy it first yourself, do let Santa know!
Brian Boyd
Nabokov and Berlin
Literaturhaus-Berlin
June 5-6, 2020
Co-organizers: Luke Parker, Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya
Proposal Deadline: January 5, 2020
This interview with Bernard Pivot, on his extremely popular television booktalk show, Apostrophes, will appear in Nabokov's Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor, forthcoming in the next two weeks from Knopf (New York) and Penguin (London), and co-edited by Anastasia Tolstoy and myself. The TLS allowed less than 24 hours to correct proofs and because of the time difference did not get my revisions until too late. I would have changed the introduction (edited by them from mine to the book version) to read:
Maurice Couturier, Nabokov scholar, writer, translator and President of Honour of the Société Française Vladimir Nabokov, ponders the fate of his collection of Nabokoviana:
The Fall 2019 issue of The Nabokovian, edited by Professor Priscilla Meyer, is now posted. The issue showcases contributions by Gavriel Shapiro, Shakeeb Arzoo, and Stephen Blackwell. Please note that access to The Nabokovian is contingent upon being a paying member of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society. IVNS can be joined here. Recent issues of Notes and Brief commentaries can be found here.
Maurice Couturier, president of honour of the Société Française Vladimir Nabokov, has written a letter to Le Monde on the subject of Nabokov's absence from its list of 100 novels that have excited its critics since 1944. The letter is pasted below:
Un surprenant absent parmi les « 100 meilleurs romans du Monde »
Maurice Couturier
Traducteur et spécialiste de Nabokov, éditeur de ses romans dans la
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, je m’étonne de ne pas trouver Lolita ou Ada
dans votre classement des 100 romans qui ont « le plus enthousiasmé »
vos critiques depuis 1944, ni même le nom de cet auteur dans la liste
The International Vladimir Nabokov Society wishes to congratulate the winners of the following prizes:
Call for Papers for The Nabokovian
It is my pleasure to announce that Drs. Gerard de Vries and Stanislav Shvabrin have been appointed by the Board of IVNS to serve in the capacity of Associate Editors of The Nabokovian.
This appointment will enable the site to grow and expand.
In my capacity of General Editor, I wish to thank Drs. de Vries and Shvabrin for their generous willingness to serve as Associate Editors.
With best wishes to all,
Dana
Nabokov's most significant and major work before The Tragedy of Mr. Morn, the 850-line poem/fairy tale "Solnechnyi Son. Skazka" (February 1923) was recently published for the first time in the second issue of the historical and cultural illustrated almanac Connaisseur (Prague, Ed. by Ivan Tolstoi), 2019, p. 362-379.
THINK, WRITE, SPEAK: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor, edited by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, has made its publication debut!
Jacqueline Hamrit's Frontières et limites dans l'oeuvre de Vladimir Nabokov, Éditions universitaires européennes, 2019 makes its debut!
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), l’auteur célèbre des romans Lolita et Ada, est un écrivain aux multiples facettes. Imprégné de culture classique, passant d’une langue à l’autre, d’un pays à l’autre, il se démarque de ses contemporains et crée une oeuvre jubilatoire qui joue avec les codes et les conventions littéraires. Les habitudes de perception du lecteur sont constamment mises en question : une telle indétermination favorise les jeux d’illusions et les dédoublements caractéristiques de l’esthétique baroque.
L’ouvrage Vladimir Nabokov et la France explore un espace de recherche vaste et peu balisé : l’invention de la France dans l’œuvre de Nabokov et l’étude interdisciplinaire de son héritage français.
Dear colleagues, I am pleased to inform you that my book "Прочтение Набокова. Изыскания и материалы" (Ivan Limbakh Publishing House, S.-Petersburg, 2019 http://limbakh.ru/index.php?id=7697) is now available for order from abroad:
https://www.vasha-kniga.com/productdetail.asp?productid=1132961
Nabokov asserts in Speak, Memory that once something has been seen, there is no unseeing it, and the afterlife of Nabokov’s translations in his compositions lend additional weight to this observation. Stanislav Shvabrin’s Between Rhyme and Reason: Vladimir Nabokov, Translation, and Dialogue explores Nabokov’s life-long involvement with translation as a form of communion with others, and Shvabrin treats Nabokov’s translations as dialogic encounters full of significance for his writings as well as his stance on translation.
Alexey Filimonov, poet, man of letters, translator, and devoted Nabokovian, is happy to announce the publication of his collection of poems Звезда-полынья (Zvezda-polyn'ia). The poems pay tribute to Nabokov, St. Petersburg, the Russian Silver Age, and the poets who fired his imagination.
Doctoral dissertations ready to go to defence: Agnès Edel-Roy and Léopold Regnier will defend their doctoral dissertations in November. Please see details below:
Soutenance de Thèse de Doctorat/Ph.D. Thesis Defense/Защита Диссертации
Dear colleagues,
I’m happy to announce the publication of my new volume,
Stephen H. Blackwell. “Calendar Anomalies, Pushkin and Aesthetic Love in Nabokov.” The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 96, no. 3, 2018, pp. 401–431. JSTOR, JSTOR.
A gripping account of the 1948 abduction of Sally Horner and the ways in which that crime inspired Vladimir Nabokov's classic novel Lolita.
Sarah Weinman will talk about her new book with Dana Dragunoiu on Thursday, September 20, at 6:30 pm at the Ottawa Public Library, Sunnyside Branch.
Princeton University Press has issued a cheap ($17.95, cheap by Princeton standards) paperback of volume 1 of the revised (1975) Nabokov translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, in their new Princeton Classics series, aimed at students; pagination, except for the front matter, remains the same as in previous editions. There is a new foreword by me.
Dear Nabokovians,
We are happy to announce the publication of the Nabokov Online Journal, Volume XII, 2018.
It is now available here: http://www.nabokovonline.com/.
Yuri Leving
on behalf of the NOJ Editorial Board
At the beginning of July, Nabokov's 25 readings presented the almanac titled Nabokov's Europe. Alexey Filimonov and Evgeny Lazerow are co-editors of the anthology. The publication consists of two volumes, which include art works by Nabokovians and scientific works, translations of Nabokov's poems, and biographical material. The works of famous and novice Nabokov researchers from different countries are published in Russian and English.
Gennady Barabtarlo's beautifully designed edition of Nabokov on dreams. Its core is Nabokov's 1964-65 experiment of recording his dreams to test J.W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time (1927), to see if any of his dreams were retrospectively precognitive. Also included are other dreams from Nabokov's diaries, and categorized references to dreams in his other work, with GB's commentary, and reflections on dreams, death, and time in Nabokov. Lavishly illustrated with images, especially of Nabokov's index cards and diaries, in the manner of The Original of Laura.
Andrei Babikov's edition of Nabokov's correspondence with his friend Mikhail Karpovich, the Harvard historian of Russia, edited, with full notes, from originals in the Nabokov archive of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, the Nabokov papers in the Library of Congress, and the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia, has recently been published in Russian:
Nabokov, Vladimir. Perepiska s Mikhaylom Karpovichem: 1933-1959. Ed. Andrei A. Babikov. Moscow: Litfakt, 2018. 160pp., ill. ISBN 978-5-9500994-0-3.
Introduction: contextualizing Nabokov (David M. Bethea and Siggy Frank)
Part I. Identity:
1. Nabokov: a life in contexts I: Russia and emigration (Brian Boyd)
2. Nabokov: a life in contexts II: beyond the emigration (Brian Boyd)
3. Childhood (Barbara Wyllie)
4. Women (Lara Delage-Toriel)
5. Friends and foes (Julian W. Connolly)
Nabokov Upside Down, edited by Brian Boyd and Marijeta Bozovic. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2017.
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