Please submit your smaller scholarly novelties to Notes and Brief Commentaries (next deadline: Feb 1, 2024).
Welcome to the official site of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society (IVNS).
Reminder
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Welcome to The Nabokovian!
Welcome to the official, newly redesigned site of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society (IVNS). You can access most of the site as you wish, but to add to or edit material wiki-style, as we would love you to do, you will have to register.
Please send suggestions, inform us of glitches, or take a stab at editing yourself (if you are a registered user of the site). New: The Nabokovian’s Notes and Brief Commentaries from No. 75 (Spring 2018) to the present are open-access and therefore available to everyone registered to the site. Old print Nabokovian issues are still available on the site only to those with fully paid memberships to the Society; these are being moved, gradually, to the free-access space on the website. Thank you to Dana Dragunoiu for plowing through this labor-intensive task.
Current Society News Highlights
We have a new issue of Notes and Brief Commentaries, edited by Eric Naiman, featuring articles by Priscilla Meyer and Gavriel Shapiro. Submissions are open for the Spring 2024 edition. Get ready for a soon-to-arrive call for papers for an international conference hosted by the IVNS and the French Vladimir Nabokov Society at Cornell University in October 2024. The next NOSE seminar will be announced soon. Nabokov-related papers at the upcoming ASEEES conference can be found here. Please explore the site, register and contribute news or corrections if you wish, and join the society to view members-only content.
Latest Discovery
The sun rises... in the west?
Everyone who hasn't thought about it should take a look at the end of Pnin, where Jonathan Rowan has identified (with the help of a Lombardy poplar) the sun's strange trick of rising in the west on the novel's final morning.
Please send in nuggets of research you are willing to share before installing them them in peer-reviewed publications. Read more
Classics from The Nabokovian
From No. 8, Spring 1982 (Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter)
Professor Nabokov: A Review Essay
by Stephen Jan Parker
One may presume that with the appearance of Lectures on Russian Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich & Bruccoli Clark, New York, 1981), following Lectures on Literature (1980), the public has now been given what is expected to be the complete record of Vladimir Nabokov's classroom teachings. . . Read more
Featured Scholarly "Note" of the Month
1948 Newspaper Column, Source for Lolita
From Matthew Roth: Late last year, I was digging around and found this source for much of the Beardsley Star "Column for Teens" that appears in Part 2, Chapter 8 of Lolita. Nabokov borrowed most of the text from a 14 May 1948 column by Elizabeth Woodward. The copy I found was published in the Dayton Herald. I'm including the text below. The capitalized text represents phrases borrowed by VN and the brackets represent VN's slight changes to the column's actual wording. Read more