Nabokov Studies最新文献

{"title":"On One of the Biographical Sources of Pale Fire","authors":"T. Ponomareva","doi":"10.1353/nab.2019.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2019.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The paper focuses on one of the possible biographical sources of Pale Fire. The link between biographical details of some of the members of the well-known Botkin family of Russia and the novel's Botkin/Kinbote is studied. Two of the Botkin family members, like the Botkin of Pale Fire, were creators of a fictitious story of a royal who had supposedly escaped death during the Revolution and became an exile, and one of them wrote a book about it. One of these Botkins was known to Nabokov personally in his Berlin years.","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129775705","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":"That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile by Azar Nafisi (review)","authors":"M. Wood","doi":"10.1353/nab.2019.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2019.0009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132034395","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":"Contributors","authors":"Z. Kuzmanovich, Dana Dragunoiu, O. Voronina, Sabine Metzger, Ludmila Shleyfer Lavine, Robyn Jensen, Zihao Liu, Juan Wu, E. Eklund","doi":"10.1163/17455316-01502001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/17455316-01502001","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":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134640761","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":"Nabokov's \"Screen Memory\"","authors":"Mikołaj Wiśniewski","doi":"10.1353/NAB.2017.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/NAB.2017.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In his essay, Mikołaj Wiśniewski returns to the question of Nabokov's denunciation of Freud as (in the words of Geoffrey Green) \"a demonic monomaniacal champion of one interpretation for all situations\" who reduces the complexity of the individual mind, and the richness and originality of artistic vision, to vulgar clichés. Drawing on Green's analyses which point out striking similarities between Freud and Nabokov, most importantly—that they were \"two writers for whom the order of artistic form was also a falsification,\" Wiśniewski proposes to consider various well-known passages from Speak, Memory (most importantly, the Kuropatkin episode) in the light of Freud's 1899 essay \"Screen Memories.\" These passages, Wiśniewski argues, are perfect examples of memories serving as screens for disagreeable content which is \"displaced on to something associated by continuity\" in order to compensate for the disappointments of an inadequate reality. However, in the context of Nabokov's novels the notion of \"screen memories\" can also be read as \"memories produced for the screen,\" movie-memories, so to speak, which are produced with the help of cinematographic techniques. These techniques are described in Ada by Marina who is called a \"dummy [with a] screen-corrupted mind.\" Such \"screen memories\" are treated by Nabokov as examples of \"bad\" memory which he distinguishes, in one of his \"strong opinions,\" from the work of a \"good memoirist [who] does his best to preserve the utmost truth of the detail.\" Wiśniewski suggests that all such efforts on Nabokov's part to strictly separate \"good memory\" from \"bad\" are intentionally misleading and, in the long run, untenable. After all, in Nabokov's novels, time and again, the boundary separating memory from consoling fiction, or outright delusion, artistic genius from madness, often turns out to be quite fluid. What is more, in Speak, Memory Nabokov seems unable to do without the strategies of montage described by Marina. Similarly, Nabokov's oft-avowed aversion to Freud is designed to mask both the affinities between them and, perhaps, the real causes of that aversion.","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"10 3 Suppl 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123666035","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":"Signs & Presents","authors":"W. Robert","doi":"10.1353/nab.2017.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2017.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper looks differently at Nabokov's \"Signs and Symbols,\" focusing on the birthday present as the hinge on which this story swings. The present, this paper argues, is not merely an object but a thing, building on Bill Brown's and Remo Bodei's work on thing theory and drawing in Jacques Derrida's treatment of the gift. In doing so, this paper articulates an ethical physics of the present that offers a different sense of \"referential mania\" and of the present's ultimate operation in the story.","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"106 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124087885","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":"Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov ed. by Gennady Barabtarlo (review)","authors":"Z. Kuzmanovich","doi":"10.1353/NAB.2017.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/NAB.2017.0009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131284123","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":"Nabokov the Psychologist","authors":"Frances Peltz Assa","doi":"10.1353/NAB.2017.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/NAB.2017.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Frances Peltz Assa argues that Nabokov's characterization of Humbert Humbert's treatment of Lolita and his attempt in Bend Sinister to elicit compassion from his readers both make use of insights that are completely consistent with recent studies on empathy and its lack. She argues that Vadim's concerns about his memory in Look at the Harlequins! pose problems that have been studied in new research on Memory. She contends that Nabokov's insights into creativity and imagination, as presented in his lecture \"The Art of Literature and Common Sense,\" are supported by psychological research on mind and creativity. She also argues that Nabokov's short story, \"Cloud Castle Lake,\" is consistent with findings from group psychology. Finally, she argues that Nabokov's own psychological well-being in the face of exile and tragedy is consistent with recent findings on trauma, which punctures Edmund Wilson's theory that Nabokov harbored much resentment due to his suffering after the revolution.","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129188593","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":"Nabokov's Philosophy of Art","authors":"Constantine Muravnik","doi":"10.1353/NAB.2017.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/NAB.2017.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay is an attempt to infer and systematize Nabokov's philosophy of art. Constantine Muravnik use the phrase \"philosophy of art\" in two senses: one refers to the philosophical study of art, that is, the relation of art to aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics; the other to the ontological foundation of artistic production. Consequently, Nabokov's philosophy of art simultaneously stands for a study of the philosophical aspects of his oeuvre, including his own theoretical statements on art and the network of affinities with certain aesthetic theories, as well as for a transcendental deduction of the original and practical source of his artistic genius. This deduction, however, requires adequate philosophical tools, which Muravnik, in turn, borrows from Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics.Contrary to the two dominant trends in Nabokov studies—the metafictional, which presents Nabokov merely as an ironic manipulator of various literary devices, and the metaphysical, which associates him with no less than a transcendent realm—Muravnik puts forth a different interpretive paradigm. Following Kant, he strictly differentiates between the transcendental and the transcendent in my approach to Nabokov: he excludes the latter and investigates the former. This differentiation provides a hermeneutic guidance that allows avoiding either of the above extremes. The entire phenomenological and markedly anti-Hegelian tradition after Kant (with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and, at times, Heidegger at center stage) associates the transcendental with aesthetic experience. Muravnik, too, connects the ontological ground of Nabokov's art with the aesthetic experience of the author and believes this experience to The phenomenological tradition claims that the artist's aesthetic experience is not conceptual and that it cannot be reduced to any number of concepts, no matter how complex; accordingly, it cannot be fully accounted for by mere analytical means. Yet, it reveals itself to the perceiver of art in one's own experience of the artwork. At the same time, non-conceptual aesthetic experience rises over aesthetics and becomes \"the symbol of morality,\" as Kant put it, without prescribing any specific ethical rules. After his exposition of Nabokov's aesthetic metaphysics, Muravnik focuses on its ethical implications and consequences, for which the Kantian distinction between the transcendent and transcendental remains key. The ethical aspect of aesthetics comes into focus every time aesthetics shows a propensity toward purity, timelessness, and perfection and divorces itself from ontology; or, on the contrary, whenever it bounds itself to utility.Muravnik acknowledges the triangular connection among aesthetics, metaphysics, and ethics generally accepted in Nabokov studies, albeit he treats them differently from their vernacular usage: metaphysics is not otherworldly; aesthetics is not scholarly; and ethics is not orthodox. He associates Kant, Schopenhauer, and Niet","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130315961","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":"\"Sois sage, ô ma douleur…\": Psychical Suffering in Some of Nabokov's Works","authors":"Jacqueline Hamrit","doi":"10.1353/NAB.2017.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/NAB.2017.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Given that psychology differs from psychoanalysis but envelops it, Jacqueline Hamrit tries to analyze Nabokov's relation to the psyche in the debate within psychological studies between those giving priority to consciousness as in cognitive sciences and those acknowledging the Unconscious as in psychoanalysis. According to Jenefer Shute, \"Nabokov considers consciousness, rather than unconsciousness, psychology's proper realm.\" This seems to be true when we refer to Nabokov's autobiography, Speak, Memory, where consciousness appears as the structural element of subjectivity. But the issue is more complex.Nabokov's hostility towards the father of psychoanalysis, Freud, and his violent criticisms are well-known. He reproaches Freudianism with its reductive symbolism, its uniform philosophical and ideological system, its proximity with the way totalitarianisms think, its determinism and thereby its refusal of free will, and finally with its negation of responsibility. Some scholars have nevertheless transgressed Nabokov's authorial interdiction to analyze his works from a Freudian point of view (Geoffrey Green with his 1988 Freud and Nabokov and Maurice Couturier in his 2004 book entitled in French Nabokov ou la cruauté du désir). Others have tried to problematize Nabokov's rejection of Freudianism. It was Jenefer Shute who drew attention to the particularity of Nabokov's obsessive rejection. Her theory is that Nabokov paradoxically affirms the importance of Freud through his negation. She considers that it is because the realm of psychoanalysis—that is, the realm of imagination, memory and desire—coincides with the domain of Nabokov's fiction that the struggle is, she says, territorial and Freud is therefore a worthy rival. Nabokov's resistance foreshadowed later criticism of a certain psychoanalysis which had veered towards a rigid, fixed, and dangerously conservative dogma.It was Jacques Derrida who best gave account of a necessary deconstruction through his reference to the presence of a double resistance, because there are, according to him, \"two forms of resistance in force, both resistance to psychoanalysis in the world and resistance to the world within psychoanalysis […]\" (États d'âme de la psychanalyse, translated by Peggy Kamuf as Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul) For him, it seems that it is no longer sexuality or the Unconscious which are characteristic of psychoanalysis but cruelty and suffering. So Hamrit studied the issue of psychical suffering in some of Nabokov's works: first, the short story \"Signs and Symbols,\" then Lolita but mostly Ada. The denunciation of cruelty, whether it be psychological, as in Ada, or political, as in Bend Sinister, becomes a militant and civic act.Moreover, Nabokov's works tell us much about the author's personality. There are indeed in his texts a tension between a luminous part and a somber one, between bliss and pain. Just as Lucette's pain in Ada corresponds to the flaw in Van a","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128754965","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":"An Interview with Maurice Couturier","authors":"Z. Kuzmanovich","doi":"10.1353/nab.2017.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2017.0007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":110136,"journal":{"name":"Nabokov Studies","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127902494","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}