The sad news has come in that Professor Stephen Jan Parker died on Tuesday. A former student of Nabokov’s at Cornell, the first to write a PhD on him, and a long-serving Professor of Russian and head of his department at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, he became a friend of the family, especially Dmitri. He founded The Nabokovian and the International Nabokov Society in 1978. He was also co-organizer of the first Nabokov conference (Cornell, 1983), author of Understanding Nabokov, co-editor of The Achievement of Vladimir Nabokov, and author of many articles, bibliographic updates and Nabokovian news items. He kept the Nabokov community informed and together in pre-Internet days and continued to serve the Nabokovs and Nabokovians, through The Nabokovian and in other ways until 2013. Institutionalised with dementia over a year ago, he was recently found to have an obstruction in his digestive tract that would have required radical surgery from which his chances of recovery were slim, so his family (his wife, Marie-Luce, and his son and daughter) opted not to put him through it.