V.V. Nabokov. Stikhotvoreniia. Foreword and commentaries  by M. E.  Malikova. Novaia biblioteka poeta. Akademicheskii project. SPb., 2002. Illustrations. Notes. Index. ISBN 5-7331-0160-1.

This handsome scholarly volume contains the vast majority of Nabokov’s poetic oeuvre – nearly 600 poems, including his translations into Russian of poems by others, plus his own 27 original English-language poems (omitting only the long poem “Pale Fire”.)  Nearly one-third  of the book is devoted to Nabokov’s translations from Russian (and French) into English.  The only notable Russian omissions (due to copyright problems) are the 40-odd older poems first  published  in the 1979 Ardis Stikhi collection, and the early verse dramas. Titles of the missing “Ardis” poems are separately listed so the reader has a record of all of the “non-dramatic” verse.  The volume also contains the poems and fragments that Nabokov incorporated into his prose works. Also included is the Pushkin/Nabokov “collaboration” – the final scene to Pushkin’s unfinished dramatic piece, Rusalka , written by Nabokov in 1942. An appendix includes four items that were excluded from the 1916 Stikhii.

Malikova’s 50-page  introductory essay, “A Forgotten Poet,”  is a survey of  Nabokov’s  poetry and its scholarship. Some may find her assessment of Nabokov as a poet to be overly cool, although she concedes the poems from the thirties onward are of different order. Malikova’s introduction covers the essential events from Nabokov’s “poetical biography,” beginning with a brief analysis of the first printed editions,   followed by an interesting discussion regarding the role of Georgian poets (mainly Rupert Brooke) during Nabokov’s most prolific poetic period, the Cambridge years.  Malikova also makes many  acute observations on Nabokov’s poetical language and on the stylistic changes in the later years of his European period.  Finally, she  illuminates Nabokov’s approach to the theory of poetic translation and cons some of the writer’s technical strategies. Not least, the notes to Malikova’s introduction constitute a good survey of extant scholarship on Nabokov the poet.

The book’s scholarly  apparatus is excellent. The editor provides over 80 pages of  background,  commentary, and bibliographic data on the poems.  All of the poems and translations are numbered and alphabetically indexed, making them quite easy to locate in the editorial notes and commentaries. The volume includes 15 photographs, including holographs of Nabokov manuscripts. With this  pioneering volume Malikova has laid the much needed groundwork for all future study of Nabokov as Russian poet.

Vladimir Mylnikov