Dear all,

A few months ago, Professor Brian Boyd kindly accepted my friendly challenge to speak on Nabokov and Machado de Assis at the Brazilian Academy of Letters. 

The lecture will take place next Thursday. It will be an unprecedented lecture and a great opportunity for Brazilian readers of Vladimir Nabokov honor the author on the one hundred tenth year of his birth. I am especially pleased to have helped facilitate this project and would like to thank Professor Boyd for his generous acceptance. 

Nabokov is an author very present in my literary life. It's great his influence in my first novel "Santos Dumont Number 8", which, once published on paper, since April, became the first Brazilian novel to be published on social networks (Twitter and Facebook). 

About an year ago, I interviewed Mr. Dmitri Nabokov (with the important help of Suellen Stringer-Hye. Thank you, Dmitri and Suellen!) for my blog Pontolit. I also remembered Nabokov in the article "Machado de Assis, the chessplayer" that I published in "Revista Brasileira", a literary magazine from the Brazilian Academy of Letters, in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the death of Machado de Assis. 

Today, mainly because of these two great authors, I write a book on the metaphor of the chess game in literature, and among 64 authors who were influenced by chess, I devote an entire chapter to Vladimir Nabokov and, off course, another for Machado de Assis. 

I believe that the dialogue between the works of these two great authors can still generate plenty of good fruits. The lecture to be given by Professor Boyd is just the beginning. I am linking a digital version of the invitation to the event and I wish to congratulate all those responsible for this great discussion list.

Best regards,

Claudio (C. S.) Soares