Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0004714, Tue, 25 Jan 2000 17:11:14 -0800

Subject
Strannoliubsky (fwd)
Date
Body
** He is, I believe, the same Alexander Nikolaevich Strannoliubsky who
was Kovalevskaya's tutor. He was also, according to a footnote in her
autobiography, "extremely popular in Petersburg radical youth circles
during the 1860s and 70s," and a champion of higher education for women.
It did occur to me that Irina Paperno, who wrote a book on Chernyshevsky,
was a likely person to have made the connection but I didn't remember
seeing it. GD ***

From: Dolinin <dolinin@facstaff.wisc.edu>

In her seminal article "How Nabokov's Gift Is Made" (Stanford
Slavic Studies 4, no. 2, 1992), Irina Paperno pinpointed the real
Strannoliubsky who was, among other things, a math teacher of Alexander
Chernyshevsky, N. G. Chernyshevsky's son. Nabokov came across his name in
Pypin's essay on Chernyshevsky's children (Zven'ia, 1, 1932) and
Chernyshevsky's Literary Heritage Collection in three volumes (1928-30)
that he studied and used for Chapter Four of The Gift.

Alexander Dolinin