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Review: Russian Function Words: Meaning And Use, Brendan Nieubuurt, Evelina Mendelevich

Russian Language Journal

Nabokov’s change in attitude toward Pushkin—a change from passive worshipper of Pushkin to self-assured interlocutor with him—he remains quiet about why Nabokov’s theory of translation changed so radically concerning Onegin. Shvabrin sets 1955 as the year of Nabokov’s “literalist” turn, though he makes little matter of the date itself. I wonder about the potential influence of surrounding events. Before he adopted his literalist rhetoric, which presented the translator as a meticulous scholar, Nabokov claimed that a translator must be a “creative genius” on par with the original poet. In 1955 Nabokov also published the novel that he knew to be …

A Theory Of Genre Formation In The Twentieth Century, Michael Rodgers

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "A Theory of Genre Formation in the Twentieth Century" Michael Rodgers explores the relationship between Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading and magical realism in order to theorize about genre formation in the twentieth century. Rodgers argues not only that specific twentieth-century narrative forms are bound intrinsically with literary realism and socio-political conditions, but also that these factors can produce formal commonalities.

Eugene Onegin The Cold War Monument: How Edmund Wilson Quarreled With Vladimir Nabokov, Tim Conley

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The tale of how Edmund Wilson quarreled with Vladimir Nabokov over the latter’s 1964 translation of Eugene Onegin can be instructively read as a politically charged event, specifically a “high culture” allegory of the Cold War. Dissemination of anti-Communist ideals (often in liberal and literary guises) was the mandate of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose funding and editorial initiatives included the publication of both pre-Revolution Russian literature and, more notoriously, the journal Encounter (1953-1990), where Nabokov’s fiery “Reply” to Wilson appeared. This essay outlines the propaganda value of the Onegin debate within and to Cold War mythology.

Nabokov, Dostoevski, Proust: Despair , Timothy L. Parrish

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Although Nabokov criticism has long identified Despair with Dostoevski, critics have for the most part addressed Despair in terms of how it either attacks or validates Dostoevski and thus have understood Nabokov to be speaking primarily about Dostoevski's achievement as a novelist. As I argue, Despair revises Dostoevski as a sly assertion of Nabokov's paradoxical aesthetic independence, and does so through the medium of Marcel Proust. It predicts the more obvious Proustian influence that critics have noticed in Nabokov's later works. In Despair Proust gives Nabokov the fundamental modernist narrative that makes an artist's coming to consciousness coincident with the …

Nabokov's "Torpid Smoke", Leona Toker

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Nabokov's short stories are polished self-contained works of art. However, like his novels and poems, they can be profitably read in the light of their place in his general canon. This place is determined by the time when each story was written and by the way in which other works enrich and elucidate the significance of its images.

The short fiction of Nabokov's Berlin period has been regarded largely as akin to studies that a painter makes in preparation for a big picture. In some cases, however, the stories seem to serve as safety valves for the urgent material that …

Nabokov's Amphiphorical Gestures , S. E. Sweeney

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In addition to using two primary kinds of metaphors (those that clarify descriptions, and those that develop into leitmotifs), Nabokov's fiction demonstrates a third kind that is characterized by extended analogies, baroque, seemingly uncontrolled imagery and rhetoric, and, most importantly, fundamental ambiguity. Although this inherent ambiguity is developed throughout the comparison, it is never resolved. Because of this distinguishing characteristic, I have named such metaphors "amphiphors," after one of Nabokov's own neologisms. Nabokov's comments in Nikolai Gogol and Lectures on Russian Literature, as well as direct allusions to Gogol embedded in a few amphiphors, suggest that this device evolved …

Practicing Nostalgia: Time And Memory In Nabokov's Early Russian Fiction , Philip Sicker

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Nabokov's earliest Russian fiction reveals his lifelong preoccupation with time and his complex strategies for preserving heightened moments of experience. Dissatisfied with the brevity of involuntary (Proustian) recall, his émigré protagonists strive to inhabit their Russian past more fully through a painstaking process of aesthetic re-creation. Beginning with a handful of vivid recollections, the hero of Mary gradually fabricates a past that is more intensely real than the original. Nabokov's most mature characters, however, recognize the solipsistic danger and utility of living in a vanished mental paradise. Turning to the present, they find unexpected beauty in the arrangement of ordinary …

Inverted Reality In Nabokov's Look At The Harlequins!, D. Barton Johnson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Look at the Harlequins! presents itself as the autobiography of a famed Anglo-Russian writer who suffers from bouts of insanity that are connected with his feeling that he is the inferior copy of another, much better writer. The autobiography is devoted mainly to his four great loves and to his books. Close analysis suggests that the narrator's account is false and is essentially a record of his delusive life during periods of insanity. LATH is seen as an example of those of Nabokov's novels that have schizoid narrators, such as The Eye, Despair, and Pale Fire, and …