The Culture of Samizdat: Literature and Underground Networks in the Late Soviet Union by Josephine von Zitzewitz (review)

Abstract

Despite these niggles, it’s no surprise that Dragunoiu’s text has won the International Vladimir Nabokov Society’s 2022 Brian Boyd Prize for Best Second Book on Nabokov. Her monograph’s meta-argument that Nabokov’s texts are arenas where heteronomous feelings duel with autonomous thinking not only breathes new life into Nabokov’s championing of the values of curiosity, tenderness, kindness and ecstasy but, echoing Richard Rorty’s wonderful analysis in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989), demonstrates just how fertile philosophical interpretation of Nabokov’s oeuvre can be.