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The tenth issue of Nabokov Studies is in press; see below for list of
contents and article abstracts. To subscribe to the journal, visit our
page on Zembla:
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/ns.htm
or e-mail the editor, Zoran Kuzmanovich, at zokuzmanovich@davidson.edu.
Questions about current subscription status, as well as article
submissions, should also be directed to Zoran.
The issue includes articles on a wide range of Nabokov's Russian and
English works--poems, stories, and novels--as well as a Forum debate on
Lolita criticism, reviews of recent scholarship, and a surprise or two.
Mary Bellino
Associate editor
NABOKOV STUDIES Volume 10
CONTENTS
Thomas Karshan
December 1925: Nabokov Between Work and Play
Edward Waysband
An Intertextual Spiderweb in Nabokov's "Cloud, Castle, Lake"
Julian W. Connolly
Black and White and Dead All Over:
Color Imagery in Nabokov's Prose
Will Norman
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and the Modernist Impasse
Shun'ichiro Akikusa
The Vanished Cane and the Revised Trick:
A Solution for Nabokov's "Lips to Lips"
John Mella
The Difference of a Sibilant: A Note on Pale Fire, Canto Three
Dustin Condren
John Shade Shaving:
Inspiration and Composition in a Selection from Pale Fire
Olga Voronina
The Tale of Enchanted Hunters: Lolita in Victorian Context
Forum
Leland de la Durantaye
Lolita in Lolita, or the Garden, the Gate and the Critics
Sarah Herbold
Fantasies of Lo
Reviews
Gerard de Vries and D. Barton Johnson, Nabokov and
the Art of Paintng.
Review by Zoran Kuzmanovich
Briefly Noted
Zoran Kuzmanovich
ABSTRACTS
Thomas Karshan
December 1925: Nabokov Between Work and Play
Nabokov's most explicit expression of his lifelong fascination with
games is his December 1925 essay, "Breitensträter – Paolino," which
begins with the claim that "Everything in the world plays." In the same
month, however, he published a short story, "A Guide to Berlin," whose
central section is entitled "Work." In these two pieces Nabokov
explores competing visions of life and art as play and as work, which
he had found discussed in an essay of 1922, "Praise of Idleness," by
his early mentor Iulii Aikhenval'd. The vision of play goes back to
Friedrich Schiller, that of work to Marx, Tolstoy, and other nineteenth
century writers. Each entails a profoundly different style, ideology,
and set of assumptions about the mind. We cannot identify Nabokov
exclusively with either vision.
Edward Waysband
An Intertextual Spiderweb in Nabokov's "Cloud, Castle, Lake"
It is well known that Nabokov's short story "Cloud, Castle, Lake"
abounds in allusions to Tiutchev's lyrics, functioning as its
metatextual "re-reading." The article takes its departure from calling
attention to an unexplored Tiutchevian allusion in the story—the image
of "the fine hair of a spiderweb," the pivotal image of Tiutchev's
famous nature lyric "There is in early autumn …" ("Est' v oseni
pervonachal'noi …"; 1857). I propose to examine the recurrence of this
Tiutchevian topos in Nabokov's Russian writings, focusing on its
function as a nostalgic sign of a Russian "paradise lost." I will also
take into account Nabo-kov's possible polemic references, in "Cloud,
Castle, Lake," to two other Russian readers of the same Tiutchev poem,
Leo Tolstoy and Osip Mandelstam.
Julian W. Connolly
Black and White and Dead All Over: Color Imagery in Nabokov's Prose
Vladimir Nabokov possessed an acute sensitivity to gradations of color,
and he rebuffed attempts to attach broad symbolic meanings to specific
colors in his work. Yet although Nabokov's work displays an impres-sive
range of color images, one color combination perhaps carried a special
resonance in his fiction. In several works the combination of black and
white appears conspicuously associated with the theme of death. The
essay focuses on the use of black and white in Laughter in the Dark and
Lolita in an attempt to explore and explain the thematic association.
Will Norman
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and the Modernist Impasse
This article takes issue with the notion that Nabokov ignored or
re-pressed the historical in his fiction. It proposes that Nabokov's
formal innovation in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight constitutes a
complex response to modernity. Through examination of the novel's
historical-cultural location, its high modernist intertexts, and its
manipulation of various forms of temporality, I demonstrate how Nabokov
here en-gages with "the modernist impasse," a perceived crisis in
autonomous, experimental fiction during the 1930s.
Shun'ichiro Akikusa
The Vanished Cane and the Revised Trick:
A Solution for Nabokov's "Lips to Lips"
Although Nabokov's short story "Lips to Lips" is usually considered to
be an implied satire of the events and personalities in the colony of
Russian émigré writers in Berlin (as Nabokov himself suggests in the
commentary to the English version), by keeping in mind literary tricks
of the sort Nabokov used in "The Vane Sisters" and by comparing the
Russian version of "Lips to Lips" with its English version, this paper
discloses a certain trick in the story suggestive of a rather different
reading. When Nabokov translated the story into English, he revised the
trick because the original Russian-language trick is based on a
grammatical fact that resists translation into English. The approach
taken in this paper reveals the advantages of comparing the Russian and
English versions of Nabokov's works.
John Mella
The Difference of a Sibilant: A Note on Pale Fire, Canto Three
Taking as metaphor Nabokov's apothegm about the cosmic and comic side
of things, we apply this to Canto Three of Pale Fire and come up with a
surprise: Not only does our illusionist poke solemn fun at the
absurdities of the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter, as we'd
expect. He also allows amid the particolored confetti some somber
themes to unfold their black striations, and illuminate the dark design
of the whole.
Dustin Condren
John Shade Shaving:
Inspiration and Composition in a Selection from Pale Fire
Charles Kinbote's aesthetic frustrations with his beloved poet John
Shade reach their apex at the start of Pale Fire's final canto, which
features long descriptions of the poet shaving in the bathtub. Kinbote
tries to elevate the passage with a desperate (and faulty) reference to
a similar moment in the oeuvre of A. E. Housman. Kinbote unwittingly
sends the reader on an allusive journey in which we find that that the
act of shaving is the figure used by both Nabokov and Housman in
describing the agony of poetic composition and the transient bliss of
inspiration. What Kinbote originally reads as a mocking parody turns
out to be a genuine, though playful, statement of artistic method.
Olga Voronina
The Tale of Enchanted Hunters: Lolita in Victorian Context
Enigmatic murals on the walls of the Enchanted Hunters Hotel create an
ambiguous setting for Lolita's "seduction" of Humbert. Images of
hunters entranced by a young nymph imply Lolita's putting a spell on
her lover and seem to support Humbert's idea of the innate viciousness
of his nymphet. Why did Nabokov need such a paradoxical inversion of
his presentation of Lolita as a "courageous victim"? This article
attempts to solve the puzzle by analyzing the novel's references to
John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll as notorious admirers of young girls. It
also points out such Victorian contexts as the Oxford Union Murals
created by Pre-Raphaelites in 1857 under Ruskin's guidance and The
Idylls of the King by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, on which the frescos were
based. The accumulation of textual and intertextual clues leads to the
interpretation of Lolita as Nabokov's critical commentary to the
Victorian discourse on art, beauty, and child sexuality.
Leland de la Durantaye
Lolita in Lolita, or the Garden, the Gate and the Critics (Forum)
A surprising number of Lolita's critics have described Lolita in the
most derogatory tones, citing what they see as her vulgarity, banality,
plebian lack of cultivation and predatory sensuality. Still other
critics have seen in her a "symbol" of such things as America and
artistic creation. In many of these cases these tendencies are
accompanied by a relative disinterest for the fate that befalls her in
the book—a tendency Nabokov's wife Véra tried to correct as early as
1959 by pointing out: "She cries every night and the critics are deaf
to her sobs." The essay seeks to follow what elements in the novel give
rise to this reaction and to elucidate what the phenomenon reflects
about the conflicting demands placed on the novel's readers.