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Nabokov’s Women: The Silent Sisterhood of Textual Nomads is the first book-length study to focus on Nabokov’s relationship with his heroines. Essays by distinguished Nabokov scholars explore the multilayered and nomadic nature of Nabokov’s women: their voice and voicelessness, their absentness, the paradigm of power and sacrifice within which they are situated, the paradox of their unattainability, their complex relationship with textual borders, the travel narrative, with the author himself. By design, Nabokov’s woman is often assigned a short-term tourist visa with a firm expiration date. Her departure is facilitated by death or involuntary absence, which watermarks her into the male protagonist’s narrative, granting him an artistic release or a gift of self-understanding. When she leaves the stage, her portrait remains ambiguous. She can be powerfully enigmatic, but not self-actualized enough to be dynamic or, for even where the terms of her existence are deeply considered or her image beheld reverently, her recognition seems to be limited to the “Works Cited” register of the male narrator’s personal life. As a result, Nabokov’s texts often feature a nomadic woman who seems to live without a narratorial homeland, papers of her own, or storytelling privileges. This volume explores the “residency status” of Nabokov’s silent nomads—his fleeting lovers, witches, muses, mermaids, and nymphets. As Nabokov scholars analyze the power dynamic of the writer’s narrative of male desire, they ponder—are these female characters directionless wanderers or covert operatives in the terrain of Nabokov’s text? Whereas each essay addresses a different aspect of Nabokov’s artistic relationship with the feminine, together they explore the politics of representation, authorization, and voicelessness. This collection offers new ways of reading and teaching Nabokov and is poised to appeal to a wide range of student and scholarly audiences.

These essays focus on Nabokov's lectures on European and Russian literature at American universities, and shed new light on the relationship of his views on aesthetics to the development of his own oeuvre.

Vladimir Nabokov was one of the greatest novelists of the previous century and his mastery of English and Russian prose is unequalled. Nabokov had originally trained to become a painter and shared Marc Chagall's tutor in Paris. In Nabokov and the Art of Painting the authors demonstrate how the art of painting is interwoven with the narratives. His novels, which refer to over a hundred paintings, show a brilliance of colours and light and dark are in a permanent dialogue with each other.Following the introduction describing the many associations Nabokov made between the literary and visual arts, several of his novels are discussed in detail: Laughter in the Dark, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pnin, Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada. Separate chapters are devoted to Leonardo da Vinci and Hieronymus Bosch, as Nabokov had a special appreciation for both painters. The authors show how the pictorial gave an extra depth to the great themes of love and loss in Nabokov's work.

In the summer of 1958, a 12-year-old girl took the world by storm—Lolita was published in the United States—and since then, her name has been taken in vain to serve a wide range of dubious ventures, both artistic and commercial. Offering a full consideration of not only “the Lolita effect\" but shifting attitudes toward the mix of sex, children, and popular entertainment from Victorian times to the present, this study explores the movies, theatrical shows, literary spin-offs, artifacts, fashion, art, photography, and tabloid excesses that have distorted Lolita's identity with an eye toward some real-life cases of young girls who became the innocent victims of someone else's obsession—unhappy sisters to one of the most affecting heroines in fiction. New insight is provided into the brief life of Lolita and into her longer afterlives as well.

Using Vladimir Nabokov as its “case study,” this volume approaches translation as a crucial avenue into literary history and theory, philosophy and interpretation. It attempts to bring together issues in translation and the shift in Nabokov studies from its earlier emphasis on the “metaliterary” to the more recent “metaphysical” approach. Addressing specific texts (both literary and cinematic), the book investigates Nabokov’s deeply ambivalent relationship to translation as a hermeneutic oscillation on his part between the relative stability of meaning, which expresses itself philosophically as a faith in the beyond, and deep metaphysical uncertainty. While Nabokov’s practice of translation changed profoundly over the course of his career, his adherence to the Romantic notion of a “true” but ultimately elusive metaphysical language remained paradoxically constant.

Literature is not only about aesthetics, but also almost equally about economics. The successful marketing of an author and his literary works is more dependent on the activities of cultural merchants than on the particular words and phrases found in the author’s prose. Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies focuses on the creation of symbolic capital for the literary legacies of Leonid Andreev and Vladimir Nabokov that was eventually exchanged by cultural merchants for financial and ideological profit. Yuri Leving and Frederick H. White discuss the ways in which certain cultural merchants created symbolic meaning for these two authors through a process of collusion, consecration, and the marketing of tangible and intangible products that lead to some sort of transaction. The promotion and maintenance of posthumous legacies involves an intricate network of personal interests that drive the preservation of literary reputations.

Shortly before Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions that the draft for his last novel, The Original of Laura, be destroyed. But in 2008 Dmitri Nabokov, the writer's only child and sole surviving heir, contravened his father's wishes. Formed from novelistic fragments that had been hidden from the public eye for three decades, The Original of Laura is a construction based on the conjecture of the Nabokov estate, publishers, and scholars. Shades of Laura returns to the \"scene of the crime,\" elucidating the process of publishing Nabokov's unfinished novel from its conception - the reproduction of 138 handwritten index cards - to the simultaneous publication of translations of the final text in several languages. The essays in this collection investigate the event of publication and reconstitute the book's critical reception, reproducing a selection of some of the most salient reviews. Critics condemned Dmitri's choice, but as contributors to this volume attest, there are many more \"shades\" and \"nuances\" to his decision. The book also endeavours to allow readers to understand and evaluate an incomplete novel; contributors analyze its plot, structure, imagery, and motifs. Published after prolonged public debate, Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura was dubbed \"the most eagerly awaited literary novel of this fledgling century.\" Covering the publication from a broad spectrum of perspectives, this collection reassesses the Nabokov canon and the roots of his literary prestige. Contributors include Paul Ardoin (Florida State University), Gennady Barabtarlo (University of Missouri), Brian Boyd (University of Auckland), Marijeta Bozovic (Colgate University), Maurice Couturier (University of Nice), Lara Delage-Toriel (Strasbourg University), Galya Diment (University of Washington), Leland de la Durantaye (Claremont McKenna College), Michael Juliar (Private collector), Eric Naiman (University of California, Berkeley), Ellen Pifer (University of Delaware), Anna Raffetto (Giulio Einaudi Publishing House, Turin), Michael Rodgers (University of Strathclyde), Rien Verhoef (Leiden University), Olga Voronina (Bard College), Tadashi Wakashima (Kyoto University), Michael Wood (Princeton University), and Barbara Wyllie (Slavonic and East European Review).

This book makes an important contribution to cultural analysis by opening up the work of two canonical authors to issues of exile and migration. Straumann's close reading of selected films and literary texts focuses on Speak Memory Lolita The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Suspicion North by Northwest and Shadow of a Doubt.

In this wry, judiciously balanced, and thoroughly engaging book, Galya Diment explores the complicated and fascinating relationship between Vladimir Nabokov and his Cornell colleague Marc Szeftel who, in the estimate of many, served as the prototype for the gentle protagonist of the novel Pnin. She offers astute comments on Nabokov s fictional process in creating Timogey Pnin and addresses hotly debated questions and long-standing riddles in Pnin and its history. Between the two of them, Nabokov and Szeftel embodied much of the complexity and variety of the Russian postrevolution emigre experience in Europe and the United States. Drawing on previously unpublished letters and diaries as well as on interview with family, friends, and collegues, Diment illuminates a fascinating cultural terrain. Pniniad--the epic of Pnin--begins with Szeftel s early life in Russia and ends with his years in Seattle at the University of Washington, turning pivotally upon the time in Szeftel s and Nabokov s lives intersected at Cornell. Nabokov apparantly was both amused by and admiring of the innocence of his historian friend. Szeftel s feelings towards Nabokov were also mixed, raning from intense disappointment over rebuffed attempts to collaborate with Nabokov to persistent envy of Nabokov s success and an increasing wistfulness over his own sense of failure.