Subject
Brian Boyd: The Nabokov Centenary Festival in St Petersburg
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. Brian Boyd and I attended the St. Petersburg VN Centennial
festivities that took place throughout much of April. Below is his report
and I hope to collect my own thoughts before too long. For the moment I
would like to add my voice to Brian's final plea about sending
publications to the Vladimir Nabokov Museum at Bolshaya Morskaya 47, Saint
Petersburg, 190000, Russia. Russian scholars and readers are hampered by
the scarcity of non-Russian publications on Nabokov. The Museum wishes to
establish a reading room. Both books and articles are much appreciated,
but do note Brian's warning to label your package mailings "Not for Sale."
I would also vigorously second Brian's praise of the the Nabokov
Museum's new, young, English-speaking administrative team. The Museum,
located in the old Nabokov mansion, needs and richly deserves the support
of every Nabokovian. Tel: (812) 315-47-13; fax: (812) 356-53-30; e-mail:
fnab@comset.spb.net. Communications should be directed to Olga Voronina or
Zakhar Fialkovsky.
--------------------------------------
In one of his best-known stories, Nabokov imagines a Russian
emigre in the 1930s entering a small museum on the French Riviera and
emerging, after a nightmare of twists and turns, to find himself to his
horror by a canal in Leningrad, in the bloody Soviet Russia of that era.
In recent years D. Barton Johnson and I have attended splendid Nabokov
conferences on the Riviera, and even investigated relics of Russian Nice,
but when this April we emerged into the air of St. Petersburg we found it
anything but nightmarish - found it, in fact, more like a wish-fulfilment
dream - as day after day we visited the V.V. Nabokov Museum.
The Museum was the focal point of the city's highly successful
International Nabokov Centenary Festival, from April 10 to 24, organized
by the St. Petersburg V.V. Nabokov Museum (Director, Dmitry Milkov, Deputy
Director, Olga Voronina, and Public Relations Director, Zakhar
Fialkovsky), as well as the Nabokov Foundation (President, Vadim Stark)
and the Rozhdestveno V. V. Nabokov Museum (Director, Alexander
Syomochkin), with the support of many other St Petersburg cultural
organizations.
The Festival opened, appropriately, on April 10, at the Nabokov Museum,
the elegant house at 47 Bol'shaya Morskaya where Nabokov was born on the
morning of April 10, Old Style, 1899. It had been hoped up to the last
minute that Nabokov's son and translator, Dmitri, would be present to
launch the Festival, but illness and injury confined him to Montreux.
Nevertheless the Festival began festively in the former library of
Nabokov's father, where V.D. Nabokov once had his morning fencing lessons,
and where on the afternoon of April 10 Terry Myers of California presented
the Museum with a valuable collection of Nabokov first editions, both
books and emigre periodicals. Russian patrons also presented the Museum
with Nabokov memorabilia, including household items from Vyra and
Rozhdestveno and books mentioned in SPEAK, MEMORY.
That evening a concert dedicated to Nabokov was staged at the
Alexandrinskiy Drama Theater, with leading St. Petersburg actors, poets
and writers speaking about Nabokov and reading from his works. The Russian
media were present in force all day, as they were for many of the festival
events. Indeed, the three major Russian television networks, ORT, RTR and
NTV, covered the events of the day in their evening news programmes.
Other events on April 10, 12, 14 I can't really comment on (as I can't
really say much about the opening session, at which I presume Vadim Stark
and Dmitry Milkov both spoke).
As part of the festival the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin
House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences hosted an International Academic
Pushkin and Nabokov Conference (April 15-18), to commemorate the two
hundredth anniversary of Pushkin's birth as well as the hundredth
anniversary of Nabokov's.
Of course, there is more than an overlap of birth years connecting Pushkin
and Nabokov. Among books launched or presented at the conference were: the
bicentennial/centennial co-publication by the Nabokov Foundation and
Iskusstvo St Petersburg of a 900-page translation into Russian of
Nabokov's commentary to EUGENE ONEGIN, complete with a facsimile
reproduction of the 1837 edition; a Pushkin-Nabokov special issue of the
journal VYSHGOROD; and issue number 3 of NABOKOVSKIY VESTNIK, a centenary
special on the Nabokov homes in St Petersburg and
Rozhdestveno-Vyra-Batovo.
Among those participating in the conference, held for the most part in an
imposing state room on the Vasilievsky Island on the embankment of the
Malaya Neva, were overseas scholars such as Mitsuyoshi Numano (Japan),
Svetlana Polskaya (Sweden), D. Barton Johnson (USA) and myself (New
Zealand), established Russian scholars such as Boris Averin and Vadim
Stark, and talented younger scholars such as Maria Malikova, Olga
Skonechnaya and Andrey Babikov. On April 17 one session of the conference
was held in the town of Siverskiy (Siverskaya), with Vadim Stark playing
the role of tour guide for conference participants as he led them around
the nearby Nabokov estates. The conference proceedings will be published
in August.
On the evening of April 17 the Lensoviet theater (the theater director
noted the irony of the locale) staged a performance of A. Getman's
adaptation of KING, QUEEN, KNAVE in a lively and polished production
directed by V. Pazi. The mannequins in the novel provided the pretext for
numerous stylish dance interludes, with top hats (as I think I recall) and
toplessness (which I know I remember).
On April 18, after the final session of the Pushkin and Nabokov
conference, the St. Petersburg Center for Books and Graphics (Russia has a
lively tradition of graphic work illustrating serious adult writing)
opened an exhibition of entries for a competition of graphic artists who
had submitted work on Nabokovian themes.
The next day a Nabokov centenary exhibit was opened at the Russian
National Library at middday. In the early evening, I gave an open lecture
at the Nabokov Museum, outlining my new interpretation of PALE FIRE; with
translations, the session lasted four hours.
The next day was a rest day in St Petersburg, although some participants
in the St Petersburg Pushkin and Nabokov conference also attended the last
days of another Nabokov Conference at the Gorky Institute of World
Literature in Moscow, April 18-20.
Over tea and brunch in the library at the Nabokov Museum, at noon on April
21, director Dmitri Milkov introduced the Museum and invited guests
introduced themselves: members of the extended Nabokov family (from
France, Ivan Nabokov, son of Nabokov's cousin, the composer Nicholas, and
his wife Claudia; from the USA, Marina Ledkovsky, daughter of Nabokov's
cousin Sonya; from Germany, her brother Nicholas Fasolt and his daughter
Natasha; from Luxembourg, Nabokov's cousin Baron Falz-Fein; and from
Russia, more distant cousins); St Petersburg city officials; consuls from
five countries, the US, Germany, Britain, France and Switzerland;
representatives of international cultural organizations (the British
Council, the French Institute in St. Petersburg, the Open Society
Institute); Alexander Kononov of Symposium Publishing House, and his
Nabokov translator, Sergey Il'in; Serena Vitale (Italy); D. Barton
Johnson, as representative of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society,
and myself. The guests discussed the future of the Nabokov Museum and
commented on the Museum's development plan as outlined by Dmitri Milkov.
The St. Petersburg City Administration, represented by the first
Vice-President of the Cultural Committee, Pavel Koshelev, promised the
museum its support, an unusual coup in view of the Museum's private
status.
In the early afternoon the guests of the Museum were taken on a tour
through the building (the first and second floor, in American parlance),
by the Museum's subtle and enthusiastic tour guide, Lyubov Klimenko, and
then later in the afternoon on a bus tour of Nabokovian sites in the city,
with Vadim Stark again providing an encyclopedic commentary. In the early
evening, at its editorial office, the long-established journal ZVEZDA
launched a special Nabokov centenary issue, with a host of Nabokov
materials unpublished in Russian or unavailable since their first
publication, including the story "Easter Rain," rediscovered by Svetlana
Polskaya.
Most Russians regard April 22 as Nabokov's "actual" birthday, since in
1899 this was the New Style equivalent of the Old Style April 10, and this
day was therefore the climax of the Festival.
In the large entrance room of the Museum Olga Voronina opened an
exhibition of hundreds of children's butterfly paintings, a successful way
of involving the wider St. Petersburg community without straining the
Museum's limited budget. Among the new publications and exhibitions
launched before a crowd of hundreds were: the Nabokov Museum's superb
brochure, whose photography, design and text reflect the imagination,
flair and energy of the young Museum directors; a ten-volume centenary
edition of Nabokov's works being published by Symposium in St Petersburg
(not only all the fiction, many of the English works being newly
translated by Sergey Il'in, but also all Nabokov's poetry from his
collections of 1918 and later, reviews, essays, interviews, and even his
translations of ALICE IN WONDERLAND and Rolland's COLAS BREUGNON); and an
exhibition of photographs of the Nabokov Museum by some of St.
Petersburg's best photographers. The lights dimmed for two birthday cakes
whose hundred candles were blown out by the members of the Nabokov family
in attendance. Again, TV, radio and print media were present and reported
extensively on the proceedings.
That evening at the Dom Uchonykh (House of Scholars) on the Nevsky
Embankment, the former palace of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, a
packed auditorium attended a "Speak, Memory" session compered by Vadim
Stark, involving reminiscences from the Nabokov family members, and
additional comments from Serena Vitale, D. Barton Johnson and myself.
Since the discrepancy between Old and New Styles increased a day each
century, the twentieth-century New Style equivalent of Old Style April 10,
1899 was April 23, the date on which Nabokov therefore naturally
celebrated his birthday after his family left Russia in 1919. This too was
a major day for the Festival.
While the St. Petersburg Nabokov Museum held an open day, the Museum's
guests took a trip out to the Nabokov estates. There they briefly joined a
large commemorative concert, also televised, in the Rozhdestveno manor
that Nabokov inherited at sixteen. Gutted by fire in 1995, the manor is
now being restored under the direction of Alexander Syomochkin, the
director of the Nabokov Museum at Rozhdestveno, who spoke eloquently on
Nabokov as the last heir of Pushkin. The guests of the St. Petersburg
Nabokov Museum and the Nabokov Foundation then toured the Nabokovian sites
in the area (the Rozhdestveno church, Vyra, Batovo), with Vadim Stark
again serving as tour guide, before banqueting at the village of Vyra
(some distance from the Nabokov manor of the same name), when many a toast
was raised to Nabokov and those who had organized and participated in the
Festival.
In the evening a one-man show of LOLITA was performed at the St.
Petersburg Nabokov Museum by Leonid Mozgovoy (who starred in the Alexander
Sokurov film MOLOKH, recent winner of the Best Screenplay award at
Cannes), while in the House of Journalists on Nevskiy Prospekt an informal
evening organized by Evgeny Belodubrovsky featured D. Barton Johnson and
myself in a panel discussion on the theme "Why Nabokov?"
The final event in the Festival, on the hundredth anniversary of Nabokov's
second day of life, was an open lecture at the Pushkin House by Serena
Vitale, incorporating a hitherto unpublished Russian lecture Nabokov wrote
on Pushkin.
Literature still plays a part more central in Russia's than in any other
nation's culture, Pushkin a role more central in Russia's and Nabokov's
sense of their heritage than anyone else, and St. Petersburg, especially
47 Bol'shaya Morskaya, and the Nabokov estates, occupy a place more
central in Nabokov's memory than any other. St. Petersburg now may not
have the wealth Nabokov was born into a hundred years ago, but how fitting
that it should be here that the longest and most elaborate commemoration
of Nabokov's hundredth anniversary took place, in the Pushkinskiy Dom, at
the Rozhdestveno Nabokov Museum, and especially at the rosy-stone house on
the Morskaya where Nabokov was born and the St. Petersburg Nabokov Museum
now stands.
It should be pointed out that the Centenary Festival is only part of the
St Petersburg V.V. Nabokov Museum's plans for the year. It has already
staged a series of "Nabokov and England" events, is planning a "Nabokov
and Carroll" follow-up, and intends a "Nabokov and Germany" focus for
later in the year. The "Nabokov and Germany" program is being curated by
Marina Koreneva, co-author of the prize-winning screenplay for MOLOKH.
In 1967 Nabokov's ZASHCHITA LUZHINA and Dzhems Dzhoys's DUBLINTSY were
parachuted into the Soviet Union in CIA-sponsored editions. On June 16,
1999, Bloomsday will be publicly celebrated for the first time in Russia
with a reading by Russian actors at the Nabokov Museum, in tribute to
Nabokov's admiration for ULYSSES. Although Nabokov in the early 1930s
approached Joyce asking if he could translate the novel into Russian, the
translation to be used, alas, will not be his.
The Museum also plans to open this year a Nabokov reading room, as a focus
for those carrying out research on Nabokov in Russia, where it is still
extremely difficult to gain access to Nabokov material other than recent
Russian reprints. The Museum would welcome copies of their work from
Western scholars, both in book and article form; anybody who does wish to
donate material is advised to use the regular postal system, and not UPS
or FedEx, which involves customs charges prohibitively expensive for the
Museum, and to mark parcels "Cultural Purposes" or "Not for sale" or
"Charity" or the like.
The Museum staff are a dedicated and talented team, working hard for
little financial reward to maximize Nabokov's presence in Russia's
cultural consciousness, and they and the many Russian scholars now wishing
to work on Nabokov should be given every possible support.
festivities that took place throughout much of April. Below is his report
and I hope to collect my own thoughts before too long. For the moment I
would like to add my voice to Brian's final plea about sending
publications to the Vladimir Nabokov Museum at Bolshaya Morskaya 47, Saint
Petersburg, 190000, Russia. Russian scholars and readers are hampered by
the scarcity of non-Russian publications on Nabokov. The Museum wishes to
establish a reading room. Both books and articles are much appreciated,
but do note Brian's warning to label your package mailings "Not for Sale."
I would also vigorously second Brian's praise of the the Nabokov
Museum's new, young, English-speaking administrative team. The Museum,
located in the old Nabokov mansion, needs and richly deserves the support
of every Nabokovian. Tel: (812) 315-47-13; fax: (812) 356-53-30; e-mail:
fnab@comset.spb.net. Communications should be directed to Olga Voronina or
Zakhar Fialkovsky.
--------------------------------------
In one of his best-known stories, Nabokov imagines a Russian
emigre in the 1930s entering a small museum on the French Riviera and
emerging, after a nightmare of twists and turns, to find himself to his
horror by a canal in Leningrad, in the bloody Soviet Russia of that era.
In recent years D. Barton Johnson and I have attended splendid Nabokov
conferences on the Riviera, and even investigated relics of Russian Nice,
but when this April we emerged into the air of St. Petersburg we found it
anything but nightmarish - found it, in fact, more like a wish-fulfilment
dream - as day after day we visited the V.V. Nabokov Museum.
The Museum was the focal point of the city's highly successful
International Nabokov Centenary Festival, from April 10 to 24, organized
by the St. Petersburg V.V. Nabokov Museum (Director, Dmitry Milkov, Deputy
Director, Olga Voronina, and Public Relations Director, Zakhar
Fialkovsky), as well as the Nabokov Foundation (President, Vadim Stark)
and the Rozhdestveno V. V. Nabokov Museum (Director, Alexander
Syomochkin), with the support of many other St Petersburg cultural
organizations.
The Festival opened, appropriately, on April 10, at the Nabokov Museum,
the elegant house at 47 Bol'shaya Morskaya where Nabokov was born on the
morning of April 10, Old Style, 1899. It had been hoped up to the last
minute that Nabokov's son and translator, Dmitri, would be present to
launch the Festival, but illness and injury confined him to Montreux.
Nevertheless the Festival began festively in the former library of
Nabokov's father, where V.D. Nabokov once had his morning fencing lessons,
and where on the afternoon of April 10 Terry Myers of California presented
the Museum with a valuable collection of Nabokov first editions, both
books and emigre periodicals. Russian patrons also presented the Museum
with Nabokov memorabilia, including household items from Vyra and
Rozhdestveno and books mentioned in SPEAK, MEMORY.
That evening a concert dedicated to Nabokov was staged at the
Alexandrinskiy Drama Theater, with leading St. Petersburg actors, poets
and writers speaking about Nabokov and reading from his works. The Russian
media were present in force all day, as they were for many of the festival
events. Indeed, the three major Russian television networks, ORT, RTR and
NTV, covered the events of the day in their evening news programmes.
Other events on April 10, 12, 14 I can't really comment on (as I can't
really say much about the opening session, at which I presume Vadim Stark
and Dmitry Milkov both spoke).
As part of the festival the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin
House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences hosted an International Academic
Pushkin and Nabokov Conference (April 15-18), to commemorate the two
hundredth anniversary of Pushkin's birth as well as the hundredth
anniversary of Nabokov's.
Of course, there is more than an overlap of birth years connecting Pushkin
and Nabokov. Among books launched or presented at the conference were: the
bicentennial/centennial co-publication by the Nabokov Foundation and
Iskusstvo St Petersburg of a 900-page translation into Russian of
Nabokov's commentary to EUGENE ONEGIN, complete with a facsimile
reproduction of the 1837 edition; a Pushkin-Nabokov special issue of the
journal VYSHGOROD; and issue number 3 of NABOKOVSKIY VESTNIK, a centenary
special on the Nabokov homes in St Petersburg and
Rozhdestveno-Vyra-Batovo.
Among those participating in the conference, held for the most part in an
imposing state room on the Vasilievsky Island on the embankment of the
Malaya Neva, were overseas scholars such as Mitsuyoshi Numano (Japan),
Svetlana Polskaya (Sweden), D. Barton Johnson (USA) and myself (New
Zealand), established Russian scholars such as Boris Averin and Vadim
Stark, and talented younger scholars such as Maria Malikova, Olga
Skonechnaya and Andrey Babikov. On April 17 one session of the conference
was held in the town of Siverskiy (Siverskaya), with Vadim Stark playing
the role of tour guide for conference participants as he led them around
the nearby Nabokov estates. The conference proceedings will be published
in August.
On the evening of April 17 the Lensoviet theater (the theater director
noted the irony of the locale) staged a performance of A. Getman's
adaptation of KING, QUEEN, KNAVE in a lively and polished production
directed by V. Pazi. The mannequins in the novel provided the pretext for
numerous stylish dance interludes, with top hats (as I think I recall) and
toplessness (which I know I remember).
On April 18, after the final session of the Pushkin and Nabokov
conference, the St. Petersburg Center for Books and Graphics (Russia has a
lively tradition of graphic work illustrating serious adult writing)
opened an exhibition of entries for a competition of graphic artists who
had submitted work on Nabokovian themes.
The next day a Nabokov centenary exhibit was opened at the Russian
National Library at middday. In the early evening, I gave an open lecture
at the Nabokov Museum, outlining my new interpretation of PALE FIRE; with
translations, the session lasted four hours.
The next day was a rest day in St Petersburg, although some participants
in the St Petersburg Pushkin and Nabokov conference also attended the last
days of another Nabokov Conference at the Gorky Institute of World
Literature in Moscow, April 18-20.
Over tea and brunch in the library at the Nabokov Museum, at noon on April
21, director Dmitri Milkov introduced the Museum and invited guests
introduced themselves: members of the extended Nabokov family (from
France, Ivan Nabokov, son of Nabokov's cousin, the composer Nicholas, and
his wife Claudia; from the USA, Marina Ledkovsky, daughter of Nabokov's
cousin Sonya; from Germany, her brother Nicholas Fasolt and his daughter
Natasha; from Luxembourg, Nabokov's cousin Baron Falz-Fein; and from
Russia, more distant cousins); St Petersburg city officials; consuls from
five countries, the US, Germany, Britain, France and Switzerland;
representatives of international cultural organizations (the British
Council, the French Institute in St. Petersburg, the Open Society
Institute); Alexander Kononov of Symposium Publishing House, and his
Nabokov translator, Sergey Il'in; Serena Vitale (Italy); D. Barton
Johnson, as representative of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society,
and myself. The guests discussed the future of the Nabokov Museum and
commented on the Museum's development plan as outlined by Dmitri Milkov.
The St. Petersburg City Administration, represented by the first
Vice-President of the Cultural Committee, Pavel Koshelev, promised the
museum its support, an unusual coup in view of the Museum's private
status.
In the early afternoon the guests of the Museum were taken on a tour
through the building (the first and second floor, in American parlance),
by the Museum's subtle and enthusiastic tour guide, Lyubov Klimenko, and
then later in the afternoon on a bus tour of Nabokovian sites in the city,
with Vadim Stark again providing an encyclopedic commentary. In the early
evening, at its editorial office, the long-established journal ZVEZDA
launched a special Nabokov centenary issue, with a host of Nabokov
materials unpublished in Russian or unavailable since their first
publication, including the story "Easter Rain," rediscovered by Svetlana
Polskaya.
Most Russians regard April 22 as Nabokov's "actual" birthday, since in
1899 this was the New Style equivalent of the Old Style April 10, and this
day was therefore the climax of the Festival.
In the large entrance room of the Museum Olga Voronina opened an
exhibition of hundreds of children's butterfly paintings, a successful way
of involving the wider St. Petersburg community without straining the
Museum's limited budget. Among the new publications and exhibitions
launched before a crowd of hundreds were: the Nabokov Museum's superb
brochure, whose photography, design and text reflect the imagination,
flair and energy of the young Museum directors; a ten-volume centenary
edition of Nabokov's works being published by Symposium in St Petersburg
(not only all the fiction, many of the English works being newly
translated by Sergey Il'in, but also all Nabokov's poetry from his
collections of 1918 and later, reviews, essays, interviews, and even his
translations of ALICE IN WONDERLAND and Rolland's COLAS BREUGNON); and an
exhibition of photographs of the Nabokov Museum by some of St.
Petersburg's best photographers. The lights dimmed for two birthday cakes
whose hundred candles were blown out by the members of the Nabokov family
in attendance. Again, TV, radio and print media were present and reported
extensively on the proceedings.
That evening at the Dom Uchonykh (House of Scholars) on the Nevsky
Embankment, the former palace of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, a
packed auditorium attended a "Speak, Memory" session compered by Vadim
Stark, involving reminiscences from the Nabokov family members, and
additional comments from Serena Vitale, D. Barton Johnson and myself.
Since the discrepancy between Old and New Styles increased a day each
century, the twentieth-century New Style equivalent of Old Style April 10,
1899 was April 23, the date on which Nabokov therefore naturally
celebrated his birthday after his family left Russia in 1919. This too was
a major day for the Festival.
While the St. Petersburg Nabokov Museum held an open day, the Museum's
guests took a trip out to the Nabokov estates. There they briefly joined a
large commemorative concert, also televised, in the Rozhdestveno manor
that Nabokov inherited at sixteen. Gutted by fire in 1995, the manor is
now being restored under the direction of Alexander Syomochkin, the
director of the Nabokov Museum at Rozhdestveno, who spoke eloquently on
Nabokov as the last heir of Pushkin. The guests of the St. Petersburg
Nabokov Museum and the Nabokov Foundation then toured the Nabokovian sites
in the area (the Rozhdestveno church, Vyra, Batovo), with Vadim Stark
again serving as tour guide, before banqueting at the village of Vyra
(some distance from the Nabokov manor of the same name), when many a toast
was raised to Nabokov and those who had organized and participated in the
Festival.
In the evening a one-man show of LOLITA was performed at the St.
Petersburg Nabokov Museum by Leonid Mozgovoy (who starred in the Alexander
Sokurov film MOLOKH, recent winner of the Best Screenplay award at
Cannes), while in the House of Journalists on Nevskiy Prospekt an informal
evening organized by Evgeny Belodubrovsky featured D. Barton Johnson and
myself in a panel discussion on the theme "Why Nabokov?"
The final event in the Festival, on the hundredth anniversary of Nabokov's
second day of life, was an open lecture at the Pushkin House by Serena
Vitale, incorporating a hitherto unpublished Russian lecture Nabokov wrote
on Pushkin.
Literature still plays a part more central in Russia's than in any other
nation's culture, Pushkin a role more central in Russia's and Nabokov's
sense of their heritage than anyone else, and St. Petersburg, especially
47 Bol'shaya Morskaya, and the Nabokov estates, occupy a place more
central in Nabokov's memory than any other. St. Petersburg now may not
have the wealth Nabokov was born into a hundred years ago, but how fitting
that it should be here that the longest and most elaborate commemoration
of Nabokov's hundredth anniversary took place, in the Pushkinskiy Dom, at
the Rozhdestveno Nabokov Museum, and especially at the rosy-stone house on
the Morskaya where Nabokov was born and the St. Petersburg Nabokov Museum
now stands.
It should be pointed out that the Centenary Festival is only part of the
St Petersburg V.V. Nabokov Museum's plans for the year. It has already
staged a series of "Nabokov and England" events, is planning a "Nabokov
and Carroll" follow-up, and intends a "Nabokov and Germany" focus for
later in the year. The "Nabokov and Germany" program is being curated by
Marina Koreneva, co-author of the prize-winning screenplay for MOLOKH.
In 1967 Nabokov's ZASHCHITA LUZHINA and Dzhems Dzhoys's DUBLINTSY were
parachuted into the Soviet Union in CIA-sponsored editions. On June 16,
1999, Bloomsday will be publicly celebrated for the first time in Russia
with a reading by Russian actors at the Nabokov Museum, in tribute to
Nabokov's admiration for ULYSSES. Although Nabokov in the early 1930s
approached Joyce asking if he could translate the novel into Russian, the
translation to be used, alas, will not be his.
The Museum also plans to open this year a Nabokov reading room, as a focus
for those carrying out research on Nabokov in Russia, where it is still
extremely difficult to gain access to Nabokov material other than recent
Russian reprints. The Museum would welcome copies of their work from
Western scholars, both in book and article form; anybody who does wish to
donate material is advised to use the regular postal system, and not UPS
or FedEx, which involves customs charges prohibitively expensive for the
Museum, and to mark parcels "Cultural Purposes" or "Not for sale" or
"Charity" or the like.
The Museum staff are a dedicated and talented team, working hard for
little financial reward to maximize Nabokov's presence in Russia's
cultural consciousness, and they and the many Russian scholars now wishing
to work on Nabokov should be given every possible support.