I created this a while ago, and meant to post it once I furnish it better. It's a search engine, for Nabokov's oeuvre. If you were like me, whose mind sometimes teases and tortures its person, its plaything, you, by reminding you of one word, one phrase, whose parental sentence (you know) you know word for word, and whose birth-book (which one? which one?!) you've read twenty, thirty times, but is all of a sudden completely lost to you, except for the quaint, faint feeling that you are ever so close to getting it back, as well as the smell, the touch of those words but certainly not their sound nor spell, this might come in handy to you every now and again.
Presently, what it does is very basic. You put in any word, and it should return every instance of its use across an incomplete collection of Nabokov's works, by which I mean, Ada, Bend Sinister, LATH, Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin, Sebastian Knight, Short Stories, Speak, Memory, Transparent Things, and poems collected in Poems and Problems (I do not know what to do with the Russian works, but will be adding them in), providing the snippet surrounding your input, and the source of the snippet. Put in 'Shelley' for instance, and it would return:
- '...been known, in the lecture hall, to say Shelley when I meant Schiller. But that a fool’s slip of the tongue...' (LATH)
- '...re’ in a commendatory sense; examples: ’Shelley’s style is always very simple and good’; or ’Yeats is alway...' (Pale Fire)
- '...whole Town with innumerable lights, And Shelley’s incandescent soul Lures the pale moths of starless nights...' (Pale Fire)
Partial search works as well. Putting in 'badger', for instance, would return:
- '...k up an inkling of Lolita’s beleagured, badgered existence, particularly when the malapropism is swiftly f...' (Lolita)
- '...on. The absence of his sister, a rather badgering young lady with a caustic tongue, did not displease Pete...' (Stories)
If it does not remind you of the full sentence, at least you know better where to look for it. I will work on dividing the Stories up as well as the chapters of the books, to better help locating, and I expect to do that very soon. I have to think of something for the Commentary of Pale Fire...
It has proved helpful to me, in my research, or revisits. Hopefully, it may prove helpful to more. The link to the website: https://c-z-chen.github.io/vnsearch/.