from

THE SAINT PETERSBURG VLADIMIR NABOKOV MUSEUM

FROM: The Office of the Director Tatyana Ponomaryeva

TO:  NABOKV-L

Dear Nabokov readers and scholars, let me draw your attention  to the new organization Friends of Nabokov Museum. The Chairman and President of the FNM  Board  is  Mr. Dmitri Nabokov; Mr.Terry Myers is Vice President; and Prof. Brian Boyd -- the Director. The FNM has now been declared a tax-deductible organization for U.S. citizens by the IRS. The chief purpose of the FNM is to provide the financial support that The Vladimir Nabokov Museum in St.Petersburg  badly needs.

I know that many of you have been to our museum  as visitors, as participants in our conferences  or as teachers and students in our Nabokov 101 annual summer school. I hope that others will also visit the museum some day. Our guest book filled  with notes from people all over the world.  We  certainly realize that it’s not us but Nabokov’s art that brings people to his home,

but  we feel that the museum could offer a lot more if it had more funding. One of our most pressing needs is a modern  alarm system.  We could then exhibit things that no one has seen.  For example, quite recently (and for the first time) we went to see a part of the Nabokov family’s art collection stored, but never displayed,  in the State Russian Museum. The most unforgettable item is, of course, the portrait of Nabokov’s mother by Leon Bakst depicted in Speak, Memory. The return of the art collection to the Nabokov house is a dream for the future but an exhibition of some of its treasures is quite possible once  we have a proper security system.

Another problem is museum equipment. We don’t have enough display cases to exhibit all of our collection  and our steadily expanding library is partly stored in a closet.

All donations made by US citizens are fully tax-deductible. Even very small donations can definitely help the Museum. Please contact  Mr.Terry Myers at frendsofnabokov@sbcglobal.net  with your  questions.