Subject
Abstracts: NABOKOV STUDIES (#3;1996) (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITOR'S NOTE. Below are short bios and abstracts for three of the
authors and articles in the new (1996) issue of NABOKOV STUDIES. Also
included are the Table of Contents and order information. I would urge
all subscribers of NABOKV-L to subscribe to the journal and ALSO arrange
for their libraries to do so. The Nabokov Society provides you with both
NABOKV-L and the web site ZEMBLA at no charge. One way you can show your
appreciation is to subscribe to NABOKOV and to join the Society.
NABOKOV STUDIES contains work by leading Nabokov
scholars from around the world, as well as the contributions of other
Nabokovians both academic and otherwise. If your interest in Nabokov is
"serious," access to NABOKOV STUDIES is essential. Libraries only buy what
their users request. SO, please...
------------------
Contact Zoran Kuzmanovich <ZOKUZMANOVIC@DAVIDSON.EDU> for further
information.
------------------------------
(BIO)
Galya Diment, Associate Professor of Russian Literature at the University
of Washington, is the author of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL OF
CO-CONSCIOUSNESS: GONCHAROV, WOOLF AND JOYCE (1994), and co-editor of
BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL : THE MYTH OF SIBERIA IN RUSSIAN CULTURE (1993).
She has also written extensively on Nabokov. Her next book, PNINIADE:
VLADIMIR NABOKOV AND MARC SZEFTEL, on which the article published here is
based, is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press in 1997.
(ABSTRACT)
The article, based on the book forthcoming from the University of
Washington Press in 1997 (PNINIADE: VLADIMIR NABOKOV AND MARC SZEFTEL),
deals with a complicated professional relationship which developed between
Vladimir Nabokov and his long-time colleague at Cornell, Russian historian
Marc Szeftel, who most likely served as the main prototype for Nabokov's
Pnin. Aided by yet unpublished letters and diaries found in Marc Szeftel's
archive at the University of Washington Suzzallo Library as well as by
numerous interviews which former colleagues of both men, the author
focuses here on the Cornell period of the Nabokov-Szeftel relationship,
from Nabokov's arrival to Cornell in 1948, through his collaboration with
Szeftel and Roman Jakobson on a volume dedicated to the 12th-century
Russian epic THE LAY OF IGOR'S CAMPAIGN and up to the publication of
Nabokov's LOLITA.
--------------------------------------------
Bio:
Savely Senderovich: Professor of Russian Literature & Medieval Studies at
Cornell University Ithaca, New York. Athor of books: Aletheia (Vienna,
Austria, 1982): on the genre of elegy in Pushkin and Russian Romanticism;
Pernates (East Lansing, Michigan, 1990; with M. Senderovich): studies in
Russian poetry); Chekhov - Eye to Eye (St. Petersburg, Russia, 1994): a
study in phenomenology of creativity; St. George in Russian Culture (Bern,
Switzerland, 1994): a reconstruction of a leitmotive of Russian culture
from 12th c. to present.
Abstract
Savely Senderovich, "Dickens in Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading: A
Figure of Concealment."
Nabokov is a lyrical novelist who dreams, reflects upon his inner
experience, recollects his states of mind, and struggles with his problems
like any lyrical poet, but he does this in the form of plots, stories,
characters, events, dialogues, yet above all it is the verbal texture of
the narrative that carries the most subtle expressive valeurs. We should
recognize a more recondite phenomenon of an author who uses his narrative
not only as a means for oblique self-expression or as a pretext for
unleashing a flow of speech which is bound to carry some sticks and stones
ex profundis, but who as well realizes that a good narrative is also a
perfect means of concealing his actual intentions along with their
unforeseeable consequences, of shrouding his revelations, of caching the
expressed contents which he himself has only vaguely intuited and might not
be prepared to face. A highly self-conscious artist, Nabokov doubles every
intuitive intention in a reflexive game: among misleading allusions, at
times highly charged ones pop up - hiding an important allusion among the
cursory ones is an excellent way of coding. A plotter, he compared novel
writing to the composing of a chess problem with its traps.
In the Invitation to a Beheading, the jailer Rodion with a bunch of
keys enters the cell of Civcinnatus C. who is writing: "'You'd do better to
learn to knit like everybody else,' grumbled Rodion, 'so you could knit me
a cache-knee. Writer, indeed!'" This is an important key: a reference to C.
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, a book about revolution and beheadings.
In this book, there is a striking motif of knitting as writing, inscribing in
cipher, encoding, keeping records. The Russian original and other allusions
to this book clarify the function of this one. This episode has a
metapoetic value: it epitomizes the mechanism of concealment, it occurs in
a thicket of neutral allusions and cursory reminiscences and thus
demonstrates that the chess problem poetics of setting misleading pointers
is relevant, for it also implies correct moves amidst false set-ups.
However, the figure of concealment at the metapoetic level not
only demonstrates the workings of concealment, but also both signifies and
conceals the concealment of a different order, that which encompasses the
genuine, uncontrolled process of the psyche's self-discovery, a process
that taps into the unconscious.
------------------------------
BIO.
"Brian Walter defended his dissertation, NABOKOV AND THE ART OF
READING, in June 1995 at Washington University." He is Assistant Professor of
English at the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville, Arkansas."
He has written essays on LOLITA, BEND SINISTER, and the Library of America
Nabokov set as well as several conference papers on Nabokov delivered and
forthcoming.
ABSTRACT.
Many a Pleasant Tussle:
Edmund Wilson and the Nabokovian Aesthetic
Few prospects horrified Nabokov more than the indifference of his reader.
Nabokov's art of preciseness and exclusion entails great costs from both
the writer and the reader, requiring of the latter an ability to extract
from the act of reading a "shiver of satisfaction, to share not the
emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author -- the
joys and difficulties of creation." Nabokov seeks the audience's
surprised pleasure to confirm the affective value of his work.
This general predicament of the reader's response to Nabokov's work is
intensified in the specific case of Edmund Wilson's audience. Only a few
of Nabokov's books ever earned a kind word from his friend, and this
despite Wilson's habit of being, in Jeffrey Meyers' words, "usually (with
the exception of Nabokov) very generous about his friends' work."
Moreover, Wilson's criticism is not simply a case of the one-noted Marxist
critic decrying a lack of social concern in Nabokov's work; as Galya
Diment notes, "Wilson . . . habitually upheld one's absolute right to be a
'pure artist' if the artist's talents and inclinations directed him or her
that way." Given his characteristic generosity, Wilson, in his
disaffection with his friend's work, understandably drew Nabokov's
numerous overt efforts to call attention to the great effort he has
expended for the sake of his reader's delight. Thus, Nabokov's attempts
to win Wilson over offer a instructive microcosm of his work's troubled,
complicated relationship with its readers, manifesting the author's great
defensiveness while simultaneously extending his earnest, personal, but
highly qualified invitation to share in his aesthetic bliss.
My paper briefly sketches the important influence exerted on Nabokov's
work by his long struggle with Wilson. Far from introducing into the work
a tone of private pettiness, Wilson, by his opposition, in fact lends it
precisely the sort of historical dimension -- no matter how diffuse or
disguised -- that Nabokov consistently scorned.
--------------------------------------------------------------
ANNOUNCEMENT
Zoran Kuzmanovich (ZOKUZMANOVIC@DAVIDSON.EDU), Editor of
the annual journal NABOKOV STUDIES, announces that the new (1996) issue
is nowavailable for shipping. Please send your orders to:
Zoran Kuzmanovich, Editor
NABOKOV STUDIES <nabokov@davidson.edu>
English Department
Davidson College
Davidson North Carolina 28036
Please make out checks in U.S. funds, drawn on a U.S. bank (or a
bank with U.S. representation), for $25.50 for the new issue. A three year
subscription for the 1996, 1997, 1998 issues is available for $72.00.
Foreign subscriptions, add $4 per year. Institutional rate: $35.50 per
volume. As well as your personal orders, please ask your university
libraries to subscribe. Checks for vol. III should be made out to NABOKOV
STUDIES. Please indicate the volume number on your check.
Back issues of NABOKOV STUDIES #1 (1994) and #2 (1995) are
available from either Zoran Kuzmanovich at the above address (checks
payable to Zoran Kuzmanovich), or from Stephen Parker, Secretary/Treasurer
of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, c/o Dept. of Slavic
Languages & Literatures, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66045.
Vol. I (1994) is $21 [233pp]; vol. II (1995) -- $28 [308pp.]. Checks to
Stephen Parker should be payable to the International Vladimir Nabokov
Society. Orders for volume I (only) are also available from D. Barton
Johnson, Dept. of Germanic, Slavic & Semitic Studies, Phelps Hall, Univ.
of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106.Checks payable to D. Barton Johnson.
Sample articles from volumes I & II are available on the
Nabokov WWW-site. http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/nsintro.htm
From Vol. I: Leona Toker, "Liberal Ironists and the 'Gaudily Painted
Savage': On Richard Rorty's Reading of Vladimir Nabokov"
From Vol. II: Brian Boyd, "'Even Homais Nods': Nabokov's Fallibility or
How to Revise LOLITA"
From Vol. III Thomas Seifrid, "Nabokov's Poetics of Vision or What _Anna
Karenina_ is Doing in _Kamera obskura_ (Laughter in the Dark).
{Available soon on ZEMBLA.)
The Table of Contents for the new issue follows.
-----------------------------------------------------------
NABOKOV STUDIES (Vol. 3, 1996)
Table of Contents
From the Editor i
Contributors vii
Articles
Thomas Seifrid 1
Nabokov's Poetics of Vision, or What _Anna Karenina_
is Doing in _Kamera obskura_
Savely Senderovich 13
Dickens in Nabokov: A Figure of Concealment
Olga Skonechnaia 33
"People of the Moonlight": Silver Age Parodies in
Nabokov's _The Eye_ and _The Gift_
Galya Diment 53
Timofey Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Marc Szeftel
Brian Walter 77
Many a Pleasant Tussle: Edmund Wilson and the
Nabokovian Aesthetic
Geoffrey Green 89
Visions of a Perfect 'Past': Nabokov, Autobiography,
Biography, and Fiction
Gavriel Shapiro 101
The Salome Motif in Nabokov's _Invitation to a Beheading_
Kurt Johnson, G. Warren Whitaker, and Zsolt Balint 123
Nabokov as Lepidopterist: An Informed Appraisal
Forum
Sarah Herbold 145
Reflections on Modernism: _Lolita_ and Political Engagement
or How the Left and the Right Both Have It Wrong
Review Essay (French VN criticism.)
Jeff Edmunds 151
Nabokov, ou le vrai et l'invraisemblable
Reviews
Jane Grayson 211
_The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov_
by Vladimir E. Alexandrov
Maurice Couturier 215
_Magician's Doubts_ by Michael Wood
Sven Spieker 222
_Nabokovs Version von Pushkins Evgenij Onegin.
Zwischen Version und Fiktion: Eine obersetzungs- und
fiktionstheoretische Untersuchung_ by Michael Eskin
Sunny Otake 225
_"Anti-Bakhtin": luchshaia kniga o Vladimire Nabokove_
[_"Anti-Bakhtin": The Best Book about Vladimir Nabokov_]
by Vadim Linetskii
Nassim Berdjis 227
_Madness, Death and Disease in the Fiction of Vladimir
Nabokov_ by Nina Allan
Nassim Berdjis 229
_Der Tod im Werk Vladimir Nabokovs: Terra Incognita_
[_Death in Vladimir Nabokov's ouvre: Terra Incognita_]
by Christopher Huellen
Index 234
authors and articles in the new (1996) issue of NABOKOV STUDIES. Also
included are the Table of Contents and order information. I would urge
all subscribers of NABOKV-L to subscribe to the journal and ALSO arrange
for their libraries to do so. The Nabokov Society provides you with both
NABOKV-L and the web site ZEMBLA at no charge. One way you can show your
appreciation is to subscribe to NABOKOV and to join the Society.
NABOKOV STUDIES contains work by leading Nabokov
scholars from around the world, as well as the contributions of other
Nabokovians both academic and otherwise. If your interest in Nabokov is
"serious," access to NABOKOV STUDIES is essential. Libraries only buy what
their users request. SO, please...
------------------
Contact Zoran Kuzmanovich <ZOKUZMANOVIC@DAVIDSON.EDU> for further
information.
------------------------------
(BIO)
Galya Diment, Associate Professor of Russian Literature at the University
of Washington, is the author of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL OF
CO-CONSCIOUSNESS: GONCHAROV, WOOLF AND JOYCE (1994), and co-editor of
BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL : THE MYTH OF SIBERIA IN RUSSIAN CULTURE (1993).
She has also written extensively on Nabokov. Her next book, PNINIADE:
VLADIMIR NABOKOV AND MARC SZEFTEL, on which the article published here is
based, is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press in 1997.
(ABSTRACT)
The article, based on the book forthcoming from the University of
Washington Press in 1997 (PNINIADE: VLADIMIR NABOKOV AND MARC SZEFTEL),
deals with a complicated professional relationship which developed between
Vladimir Nabokov and his long-time colleague at Cornell, Russian historian
Marc Szeftel, who most likely served as the main prototype for Nabokov's
Pnin. Aided by yet unpublished letters and diaries found in Marc Szeftel's
archive at the University of Washington Suzzallo Library as well as by
numerous interviews which former colleagues of both men, the author
focuses here on the Cornell period of the Nabokov-Szeftel relationship,
from Nabokov's arrival to Cornell in 1948, through his collaboration with
Szeftel and Roman Jakobson on a volume dedicated to the 12th-century
Russian epic THE LAY OF IGOR'S CAMPAIGN and up to the publication of
Nabokov's LOLITA.
--------------------------------------------
Bio:
Savely Senderovich: Professor of Russian Literature & Medieval Studies at
Cornell University Ithaca, New York. Athor of books: Aletheia (Vienna,
Austria, 1982): on the genre of elegy in Pushkin and Russian Romanticism;
Pernates (East Lansing, Michigan, 1990; with M. Senderovich): studies in
Russian poetry); Chekhov - Eye to Eye (St. Petersburg, Russia, 1994): a
study in phenomenology of creativity; St. George in Russian Culture (Bern,
Switzerland, 1994): a reconstruction of a leitmotive of Russian culture
from 12th c. to present.
Abstract
Savely Senderovich, "Dickens in Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading: A
Figure of Concealment."
Nabokov is a lyrical novelist who dreams, reflects upon his inner
experience, recollects his states of mind, and struggles with his problems
like any lyrical poet, but he does this in the form of plots, stories,
characters, events, dialogues, yet above all it is the verbal texture of
the narrative that carries the most subtle expressive valeurs. We should
recognize a more recondite phenomenon of an author who uses his narrative
not only as a means for oblique self-expression or as a pretext for
unleashing a flow of speech which is bound to carry some sticks and stones
ex profundis, but who as well realizes that a good narrative is also a
perfect means of concealing his actual intentions along with their
unforeseeable consequences, of shrouding his revelations, of caching the
expressed contents which he himself has only vaguely intuited and might not
be prepared to face. A highly self-conscious artist, Nabokov doubles every
intuitive intention in a reflexive game: among misleading allusions, at
times highly charged ones pop up - hiding an important allusion among the
cursory ones is an excellent way of coding. A plotter, he compared novel
writing to the composing of a chess problem with its traps.
In the Invitation to a Beheading, the jailer Rodion with a bunch of
keys enters the cell of Civcinnatus C. who is writing: "'You'd do better to
learn to knit like everybody else,' grumbled Rodion, 'so you could knit me
a cache-knee. Writer, indeed!'" This is an important key: a reference to C.
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, a book about revolution and beheadings.
In this book, there is a striking motif of knitting as writing, inscribing in
cipher, encoding, keeping records. The Russian original and other allusions
to this book clarify the function of this one. This episode has a
metapoetic value: it epitomizes the mechanism of concealment, it occurs in
a thicket of neutral allusions and cursory reminiscences and thus
demonstrates that the chess problem poetics of setting misleading pointers
is relevant, for it also implies correct moves amidst false set-ups.
However, the figure of concealment at the metapoetic level not
only demonstrates the workings of concealment, but also both signifies and
conceals the concealment of a different order, that which encompasses the
genuine, uncontrolled process of the psyche's self-discovery, a process
that taps into the unconscious.
------------------------------
BIO.
"Brian Walter defended his dissertation, NABOKOV AND THE ART OF
READING, in June 1995 at Washington University." He is Assistant Professor of
English at the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville, Arkansas."
He has written essays on LOLITA, BEND SINISTER, and the Library of America
Nabokov set as well as several conference papers on Nabokov delivered and
forthcoming.
ABSTRACT.
Many a Pleasant Tussle:
Edmund Wilson and the Nabokovian Aesthetic
Few prospects horrified Nabokov more than the indifference of his reader.
Nabokov's art of preciseness and exclusion entails great costs from both
the writer and the reader, requiring of the latter an ability to extract
from the act of reading a "shiver of satisfaction, to share not the
emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author -- the
joys and difficulties of creation." Nabokov seeks the audience's
surprised pleasure to confirm the affective value of his work.
This general predicament of the reader's response to Nabokov's work is
intensified in the specific case of Edmund Wilson's audience. Only a few
of Nabokov's books ever earned a kind word from his friend, and this
despite Wilson's habit of being, in Jeffrey Meyers' words, "usually (with
the exception of Nabokov) very generous about his friends' work."
Moreover, Wilson's criticism is not simply a case of the one-noted Marxist
critic decrying a lack of social concern in Nabokov's work; as Galya
Diment notes, "Wilson . . . habitually upheld one's absolute right to be a
'pure artist' if the artist's talents and inclinations directed him or her
that way." Given his characteristic generosity, Wilson, in his
disaffection with his friend's work, understandably drew Nabokov's
numerous overt efforts to call attention to the great effort he has
expended for the sake of his reader's delight. Thus, Nabokov's attempts
to win Wilson over offer a instructive microcosm of his work's troubled,
complicated relationship with its readers, manifesting the author's great
defensiveness while simultaneously extending his earnest, personal, but
highly qualified invitation to share in his aesthetic bliss.
My paper briefly sketches the important influence exerted on Nabokov's
work by his long struggle with Wilson. Far from introducing into the work
a tone of private pettiness, Wilson, by his opposition, in fact lends it
precisely the sort of historical dimension -- no matter how diffuse or
disguised -- that Nabokov consistently scorned.
--------------------------------------------------------------
ANNOUNCEMENT
Zoran Kuzmanovich (ZOKUZMANOVIC@DAVIDSON.EDU), Editor of
the annual journal NABOKOV STUDIES, announces that the new (1996) issue
is nowavailable for shipping. Please send your orders to:
Zoran Kuzmanovich, Editor
NABOKOV STUDIES <nabokov@davidson.edu>
English Department
Davidson College
Davidson North Carolina 28036
Please make out checks in U.S. funds, drawn on a U.S. bank (or a
bank with U.S. representation), for $25.50 for the new issue. A three year
subscription for the 1996, 1997, 1998 issues is available for $72.00.
Foreign subscriptions, add $4 per year. Institutional rate: $35.50 per
volume. As well as your personal orders, please ask your university
libraries to subscribe. Checks for vol. III should be made out to NABOKOV
STUDIES. Please indicate the volume number on your check.
Back issues of NABOKOV STUDIES #1 (1994) and #2 (1995) are
available from either Zoran Kuzmanovich at the above address (checks
payable to Zoran Kuzmanovich), or from Stephen Parker, Secretary/Treasurer
of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, c/o Dept. of Slavic
Languages & Literatures, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66045.
Vol. I (1994) is $21 [233pp]; vol. II (1995) -- $28 [308pp.]. Checks to
Stephen Parker should be payable to the International Vladimir Nabokov
Society. Orders for volume I (only) are also available from D. Barton
Johnson, Dept. of Germanic, Slavic & Semitic Studies, Phelps Hall, Univ.
of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106.Checks payable to D. Barton Johnson.
Sample articles from volumes I & II are available on the
Nabokov WWW-site. http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/nsintro.htm
From Vol. I: Leona Toker, "Liberal Ironists and the 'Gaudily Painted
Savage': On Richard Rorty's Reading of Vladimir Nabokov"
From Vol. II: Brian Boyd, "'Even Homais Nods': Nabokov's Fallibility or
How to Revise LOLITA"
From Vol. III Thomas Seifrid, "Nabokov's Poetics of Vision or What _Anna
Karenina_ is Doing in _Kamera obskura_ (Laughter in the Dark).
{Available soon on ZEMBLA.)
The Table of Contents for the new issue follows.
-----------------------------------------------------------
NABOKOV STUDIES (Vol. 3, 1996)
Table of Contents
From the Editor i
Contributors vii
Articles
Thomas Seifrid 1
Nabokov's Poetics of Vision, or What _Anna Karenina_
is Doing in _Kamera obskura_
Savely Senderovich 13
Dickens in Nabokov: A Figure of Concealment
Olga Skonechnaia 33
"People of the Moonlight": Silver Age Parodies in
Nabokov's _The Eye_ and _The Gift_
Galya Diment 53
Timofey Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Marc Szeftel
Brian Walter 77
Many a Pleasant Tussle: Edmund Wilson and the
Nabokovian Aesthetic
Geoffrey Green 89
Visions of a Perfect 'Past': Nabokov, Autobiography,
Biography, and Fiction
Gavriel Shapiro 101
The Salome Motif in Nabokov's _Invitation to a Beheading_
Kurt Johnson, G. Warren Whitaker, and Zsolt Balint 123
Nabokov as Lepidopterist: An Informed Appraisal
Forum
Sarah Herbold 145
Reflections on Modernism: _Lolita_ and Political Engagement
or How the Left and the Right Both Have It Wrong
Review Essay (French VN criticism.)
Jeff Edmunds 151
Nabokov, ou le vrai et l'invraisemblable
Reviews
Jane Grayson 211
_The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov_
by Vladimir E. Alexandrov
Maurice Couturier 215
_Magician's Doubts_ by Michael Wood
Sven Spieker 222
_Nabokovs Version von Pushkins Evgenij Onegin.
Zwischen Version und Fiktion: Eine obersetzungs- und
fiktionstheoretische Untersuchung_ by Michael Eskin
Sunny Otake 225
_"Anti-Bakhtin": luchshaia kniga o Vladimire Nabokove_
[_"Anti-Bakhtin": The Best Book about Vladimir Nabokov_]
by Vadim Linetskii
Nassim Berdjis 227
_Madness, Death and Disease in the Fiction of Vladimir
Nabokov_ by Nina Allan
Nassim Berdjis 229
_Der Tod im Werk Vladimir Nabokovs: Terra Incognita_
[_Death in Vladimir Nabokov's ouvre: Terra Incognita_]
by Christopher Huellen
Index 234