Nabokov Studies最新文献

{"title":"Eary Doubles: Tympanic Mechanisms and Cochlear Structures in Nabokov's Ada","authors":"Sabine Metzger","doi":"10.1353/nab.2022.a901979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2022.a901979","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:As this paper will show, Ada's bizarre telecommunication devices are far more than technical solutions of the problems imposed by Antiterran ban of electricity. Ada foregrounds their operation mode in terms of transmission and transduction, and, with it, what Jonathan Sterne identifies as sound reproduction devices' \"tympanic principle\" that simulates the mechanism of the human eardrum. Whether hand-cranked, operating on fluids like Olga Veen's bizarre invention and its offspring, the aquaphone, or on modulated current – Ada's telecommunication devices are based on the tympanic principle. They are abstractions of the human ear, or \"eary doubles\" which turn Ada into the continuation of Nabokov's previous inquiries into sound propagation and the vibrational nexus.Ada, however, goes beyond the tympanum. Abstractions of the human ear are likewise the numerous cochlear structures to which the novel refers. Spirals and whelks evoke the cochlea which, located anatomically, to express it in Van's words, \"between [tympanic] membrane and brain\" processes sound's frequencies, time and timbre. Situated at the intersections of the physical and the physiological, of the technological and the organic, of acoustics and aesthetics, Ada's eary doubles articulate Nabokov's keen interest in the physical and the physiological aspects of the auditory from which its metaphysical dimension derives.","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116841533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts by Dana Dragunoiu (review)","authors":"E. Eklund","doi":"10.1353/nab.2022.a901984","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2022.a901984","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130705349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"A Bit of Haze is Quite Indispensable Here\": Creative Compromises and Narrative Clues in Nabokov's Letters to American Editors","authors":"O. Voronina","doi":"10.1353/nab.2022.a901978","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2022.a901978","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper challenges the myth of Nabokov's creative invincibility by addressing the writer's openness to editorial suggestions and even direct interferences in his work in the 1940-60s, the time of his early tentative exploration and, later, triumphant conquest of the American literary market. Grounded in a detailed analysis of Nabokov's correspondence with editors of American periodicals, the New Yorker and Playboy among them, it aims to compare the very Nabokovian project of educating an American reader to the unexpectedly long-term and involved process of his own \"schooling\" as an American writer. Since Nabokov was sometimes obliged to reveal his literary secrets to editorial teams in order to maintain the integrity and hidden complexity of his narrative patterns for a larger audience, the letters cited in this essay also clarify some enigmatic artistic choices in such works as Pnin and The Eye.","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123694695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Had I been a painter\": Lolita and the Perversity of Interart Relations","authors":"Robyn Jensen","doi":"10.1353/nab.2022.a901981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2022.a901981","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Discussions of interart relations have often relied on a rhetoric of sexual perversion to reaffirm artistic borders, from G. E. Lessing's Laocoön (1766) to twentieth-century theories of medium specificity. This article considers the \"perversity\" of interart relations embedded in Lolita, Nabokov's novel of pedophilia. While the commingling of the arts is a key aspect of Nabokov's visual poetics, the logic of this principle is interrogated in Lolita. Whether perceiving Lolita as a visual image or imagining a mural of their sexual union, Humbert repeatedly attempts to transfigure his temporal narrative into the spatial realm of the visual as a means of preserving his \"nymphet\" from the corruption of time. This, I suggest, is analogous to Nabokov's own artistic efforts to escape the temporal progression imposed by sequential narrative form by appealing to the visual arts. By examining Lolita within the context of a long-standing discourse that sees relations between the sister arts as perverse, I argue that the novel's overt transgression of sexual taboos discloses an underlying aesthetic anxiety about the transgression of interart boundaries, in particular the novel's aspiration towards spatial form. Central to this is the novel's reworking of the Pygmalion myth, one of the foundational myths not only about artistic creation, but about the artist as a transgressive figure who violates aesthetic as well as erotic laws. The article ultimately concludes that, in Lolita, Nabokov revalorizes the sequential aspect of narrative (and the temporality of re-reading) as a positive attribute of novelistic form, not as something to be overcome in imitation of painting.","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132564319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Phenomenological Interpretation of \"Veen's Time\"","authors":"Zihao Liu","doi":"10.1353/nab.2022.a901982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2022.a901982","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:To establish The Texture of Time as a notable philosophical achievement, this essay puts it in the context of transcendental phenomenology and elucidates \"Veen's Time\" by way of comparison to Husserl's theory of time-consciousness. Despite Nabokov's apparent disinterest in phenomenology, the monist stance, descriptive method and de facto epoché in The Texture of Time all point to it being a piece of phenomenological analysis. Veen's conception of the Present as a hollow is analogous to Husserl's notion of the absolute flow of time-constituting consciousness; by emphasizing the stillness of the Present, Veen even irons out a couple of rough edges in Husserl's account. The Past is not a mere extension of the Present, but an equally important panel of \"Veen's Time\" with its own structure that centers on the subject and the object as two identity poles. Finally, drawing on the concept of \"protention,\" the future-facing element of the Present, Veen's dismissal of the Future as \"a quack at the court of Chronos\" is interpreted as attacking the conventional tripartite image of Time instead of the Future per se.","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"99 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130872335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Othering Biological Poetics: Evolution, Speciation and Lepidoptery in Nabokov's The Gift and \"Father's Butterflies\"","authors":"Juan Wu","doi":"10.1353/nab.2022.a901983","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2022.a901983","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Nabokov was a great writer and a professional biologist with an intense interest in evolutionary theory, and it seems sensible to conclude that his literary creations were heavily influenced by his scientific research. This paper examines how Nabokov's lepidopterological research sheds significant light on his artistic works, including the novel The Gift and its rejected addendum, \"Father's Butterflies,\" and explores how these works embody Nabokov's views on nature, art, and natural selection. It also investigates how Nabokov adopts narrative strategies of parodies, allusions, symbols and narratives to reflect on the universal validity of Darwinism but also to insert his speculation on natural selection and theories of speciation in the narratives. Nabokov's writing evinces no serious quarrel with the basic principles of natural selection. Yet, his work reflects his skepticism of an approach to the world that solely relies on quantitative and statistical analysis.","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129882420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In Memoriam Gennady (Gene) Alexandrovich Barabtarlo (February 15, 1949 – February 24, 2019)","authors":"Z. Kuzmanovich","doi":"10.1353/nab.2022.a901976","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2022.a901976","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"78 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126295329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ruslan and Lolita: Nabokov's Pursuit of Pushkin's Monsters, Maidens, and Morals","authors":"Ludmila Shleyfer Lavine","doi":"10.1353/nab.2022.a901980","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2022.a901980","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The previously unexplored Russian precursor to Humbert's \"kingdom by the sea\"—Pushkin's mock-epic Ruslan and Liudmila (RL)—permeates different layers of meaning in Lolita. An amalgam of Slavic and Western folklore that scandalized the reading public in its day, Pushkin's work underpins Nabokov's own transnational position as a writer, whose splash onto the Anglophone scene was accompanied by similar outcries of smut and pornography. In addition to a multitude of fairy-tale sources already documented in the scholarship, Lolita's cluster of mermaids, sleeping beauties, dark magic, invisibility, pursuit and captivity, physical topography, and \"brother\"-rivals finds in Pushkin's RL a synthesizing intertext. Moreover, Pushkin's play with genre in RL guides Nabokov's in Lolita, oscillating between the frozen fairy-tale moment and the passage of time in a novel. Finally, RL provides a model for simultaneously subverting expectations of moral lessons from \"fairy tales\" while engaging ethics in the artistic process more fully than any didactic literature can. It is here where we can begin to address the care with which the author keeps Pushkin away from Humbert's world of references; the intricate ethics-aesthetics fusion that the author soaks up through his greatest Russian mentor cannot be available to an impostor-artist such as Humbert.","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114594329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hazel Shade's Russian Sisterhood, or Is Pale Fire a Feminist Novel? In memory of Gennady Barabtarlo","authors":"Dana Dragunoiu","doi":"10.1353/nab.2022.a901977","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2022.a901977","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The essay traces Nabokov's representation of women from the Russian-language works in which he shows a sustained interest in women's lives to the English-language works whose plots often double as whodunnits, driven as they are by questions such as \"who is she?\" and \"what has she done?\" I argue that The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, \"The Vane Sisters,\" Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada dramatize what feminist commentators have identified as properties of patriarchal literary representation: the primacy of women coupled by their absence (De Lauretis), under-description (Heldt), and action delimited by the Love Story plot (Russ). Though some of Nabokov's works perpetuate these conventions, his most enduringly mysterious fiction forces readers to care and wonder about women characters who are under-described and overlooked. The essay also uses the insights of feminist scholars who have written on Lolita (Kauffman, Patnoe, Herbold) to argue that Pale Fire extends the achievements of Lolita by staging a different kind of entrapment: readers are seduced into colluding with Shade's obliteration of his daughter Hazel by focusing too much on her body and disregarding her mind. In one of Pale Fire's subtlest ironies, Shade treats his grief at his daughter's loss by foregrounding his own spiritual quest but continuing to ignore hers. I argue further that the importance of Hazel's spiritual strivings become most clear if seen through the lens of Russia's literary tradition. The second half of the essay traces important bonds of kinship that connect Hazel to Tatyana Larin, the female protagonist of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and Cecily von Lindenborn, the protagonist of Karolina Pavlova's only novel A Double Life (1848). Pavlova's novel, combining as it does prose and verse, offers more than a formal precedent for Pale Fire: the plot rescues Hazel from the captivity of the Love Story plot and places her in a context that is more relevant to her own concerns. The essay ends with a tribute to Gennady Barabtarlo, for whom Hazel's predicament anticipated the predicament of another beloved but disregarded daughter: Martyshka of Tarkovsky's Stalker.","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122493266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lucette late in Ada","authors":"Brian Boyd","doi":"10.1353/nab.2020.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2020.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In Nabokov's Ada, I proposed long ago, Lucette intervenes in Van and Ada's life after her own death: in 1922, when they reunite for life, after a shaky first attempt, and in the last ten years of their lives, 1957-1967, when Van writes his memoir of his love for Ada. Others have accepted the evidence for these interventions. But we have overlooked the strong evidence for Lucette's post-mortal intervention in their lives in their 1905 reunion, which for readers follows swiftly upon her suicide. I had also failed to appreciate how aware Van and Ada seem to be—even if tentatively and obliquely—of Lucette's kindly spectral presence at crucial turning points in their lives.","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115264299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}