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----- Original Message -----

Dear List members (particularly those of you who read Russian and can read the Cyrillic on your computers),

 

I didn't participate this year in the annual Nabokov conference ("Nabokovskie chteniya") which took place yesterday at the Nabokov museum. In compensation, I would like to offer you a short article I have just finished. Alas, it is in Russian and has still to be translated (I hope, the English translation will appear in the fall issue of The Nabokovian). I know the electronic Russian version of my paper will have a not very wide readership, but on the other hand, I will find in you the most intelligent audience imaginable. In fact, there will be among you several people whose opinion about my work I value most.

 

Much to my regret, Ada still remains the antiterra incognita not only for most Russian readers, but also for most Russian Nabokov scholars, including several unfortunate "translators" of that novel. And this despite the fact that Ada fits so well in Russian cultural tradition that it can be termed, as I do it at the end of my note, "a Russian novel written in English."

 

My dear friend Carolyn Kunin has promised to continue to help me translating my notes into English. But at the moment she is busy translating v. Lichberg's "Lolita" for the benefit of the non-German-reading part of the List. She says my difficult Russian note has to wait. Well, I don't protest. May be she is right after all?

 

Alexey Sklyarenko