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). The TLS 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
A "beta" English version of Olga Skonechnaia's voluminous commentary to Invitation to a Beheading is now available (click here to see).
Dear Adaphiles,
The notes to Ada 1.43 have been added to the Annotations section of the website, which also means the notes to Ada 1.41 are now available (with hyperlinks to motifs and illustrations) on AdaOnline. Thanks once again to Steve Blackwell for acting as editor of the new annotations, kindly continuing the momentum of his role as the last editor of the print Nabokovian.
Dear Readers of The Nabokovian:
The International Vladimir Nabokov Society, the Société française Vladimir Nabokov and the Nabokov Society of Japan make a joint appeal to Russia's Ministry of Culture in three open letters.
These urgent letters, published at the bottom of this message, were published in an article by Maria Bashmakova in Kommersant. The Ministry's reply to the last letter sent to it by the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation is embedded in this same article.
On behalf of the organizers of the annual "Nabokov Readings 2019 International Conference /
Набоковские чтения – 2019 Международнaя конференция,"
it is my great pleasure to announce the conference program. The conference takes place from
3-5 July / 3-5 июля 2019.
The Société Française Vladimir Nabokov has hosted yet another magnificent conference, this time at Université Cergy-Pontoise, the Sorbonne, and Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration. Plenary speakers, Isabelle Poulin and Will Norman, delivered fascinating talks on the first two days of the conference and were accompanied by speakers from several generations of Nabokovians. At the Musée National, we listened to a seminal talk on Russian immigration, which disclosed unpublished documents from the Nina Berberova Archives (including letters and notes from Nabokov).
The Societé française de Vladimir Nabokov is pleased to announce its Fourth International Symposium, "Vladimir Nabokov: Histoire et géographie." The Symposium takes place from June 6-8, 2019, at the Université de Cergy-Pontoise, Sorbonne Université, and National Museum of Immigration (Porte Dorée Palace).
Dear Friends of Nabokov:
On behalf of Nabokovians worldwide, happy birthday dear Vladimir Nabokov!
With Zoran Kuzmanovich's permission, I post these birthday greetings for everyone to enjoy, including perhaps Nabokov himself (wherever he might be perched himself):
Happy Birthday to the man whose work makes us attend to the stained glass windows of life while we wait for the right word not only to perch itself on our keyboards but to do so without echoing one of his too obviously. This grateful well-wisher already knows that he did not wait long enough.
Zoran Kuzmanovich
Saluting the good reader,
Dana
Dear Nabokovians:
The spring issue of The Nabokovian is now posted! A big thank you to Priscilla Meyer, editor of The Nabokovian, and this issue's four contributors: Gerard de Vries, Mary Ross, Frances Peltz Assa and J.B. Geen.
Happy reading,
Dana
JJ Heckenhauer is a rare bookseller with a tradition for Russian books for more than 50 years. The bookseller has recently acquired a collection with more than 100 titles about Nabokov. The list is attached. If anyone is interested in this collection or thinks their institution might be interested in purchasing it, please contact Roger Sonnewald at ant@heckenhauer.de
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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