I am reviewing a Danish book Ulven kommer (Gyldendal 2016), a translation by Henrik G. Poulsen of miscellaneous texts by Nabokov, mostly picked from the Lectures and Strong Opinions.

What bothers me are the essays Poulsen translated from Lectures on Literature and Lectures on Russian Literature. In a note in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Boyd writes: “The lectures as edited for publication contain many puzzling omissions, misreadings, spurious improvements and even sheer editorial inventions.”  And I recall that Vladimir E. Alexandrov, in Nabokov’s Otherworld (which I don't have near at hand), found the missing two pages from the essay The Art of Literature and Commonsense – the two pages turned out to be a sentence.

So I have two questions:

1. Can anyone enlighten me regarding the missing two pages?

2. If they as poorly edited as Boyd writes, how do we as scholars use the Lectures in a responsible fashion?

Best Wishes, Ole Nyegaard, Aarhus, Denmark.