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Death By Delusion: Representations Of Mental Illness In Gogol, Dostoevsky, And Nabokov, Bryan Reed

Senior Projects Spring 2023

This paper is dedicated to an analysis of representation of mental illness in 19th-20th century works of Russian writers: Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Double), Nikolai Gogol (“Nevsky Prospect”, “The Overcoat”, and “The Diary of a Madman”), and Vladimir Nabokov (Despair). My analysis is primarily focused on the approaches these authors employ to represent mental illness. When I began my research, I also set out to trace the evolution of portrayals of mental illness in Russian literature, from one of its founders, Alexander Pushkin, to Nabokov as an émigré writer living in Germany during the 1930s and representing the literary tradition in …

Ruslan And Lolita: Nabokov's Pursuit Of Pushkin's Monsters, Maidens, And Morals, Ludmila Lavine

Faculty Journal Articles

This article discusses the Russian precursor to Humbert’s explicit “kingdom by the sea”: Pushkin’s mock-epic Ruslan and Liudmila (RL). An amalgam of Slavic and Western folklore that scandalized the reading public in its day, Pushkin’s work underpins Nabokov’s own transnational position as a writer whose splash onto the Anglophone scene was accompanied by similar outcries of smut and pornography. In addition to a multitude of fairy-tale sources already documented in the scholarship, Lolita’s cluster of mermaids, sleeping beauties, dark magic, invisibility, pursuit and captivity, physical topography, and “brothers”-rivals finds in Pushkin’s RL a synthesizing subtext. Moreover, Pushkin’s play …

Moral Systems In Nabokov's Fiction: Commentaries On Two Short Stories, Benjamin Yung Nathaniel Shaw

Senior Projects Fall 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Save A Cow, Eat A Pedophile: Vladimir Nabokov’S Lolita, Abigail Rose Manis

Student Scholarship

Many who read Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita express negative reactions at its conclusion, such as revulsion, anger, and outright dismissal of its highly controversial plot. However, the contents of this story constitute only half of its importance. The other half is the hypnotic and slippery mode in which it is told. The dual configuration of the narrator as the protagonist allows the main character to craft his own version of the events that have taken place in his life through a demented, artistic frame.

This essay argues for the interpretation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita as a dark fairy tale. My …

Rewriting Women: A Feminist Examination Of Lolita's And Pride And Prejudice's Costume And Revisionist Adaptations, Courtney A. Duchene Ms.

English Honors Papers

This project examines costume and revisionist media adaptations of Lolita and Pride and Prejudice to see how adapters have altered the texts in order to increase the agency of the female characters. It consists of four chapters: one on the 1962 and 1997 cinematic costume adaptations of Lolita; one on the 1995 BBC mini series and the 2005 film costume adaptations of Pride and Prejudice; one on the Pride and Prejudice revisionist adaptations, Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and the 2012-2013 Youtube series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries; and one on the revisionist film adaptations of Lolita, The Diary …

Gendered Melancholy In Lolita: Reading Into Humbert Humbert’S Dolorous Haze, Joseph D. Brookbank

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper argues that in Lolita, the narrator Humbert Humbert uses the subject-position of the great male melancholic in order to, at the discursive level, (re)perform violent acts of appropriation against Dolly’s body, subjectivity and representation. Humbert attempts to translate the loss and waste which he brings about into perverse sorts of gain; these gains relate to processes such as catharsis, compensation, redemption, regeneration, a sense of exceptionality, and aesthetic/erotic/artistic enjoyment. The project has an introduction and two sections. The introduction demonstrates how Humbert enters into the male melancholic subject-position in order to perform his sorrow in a way that …

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 …

I Know You Are, But What Am I?: The Language Of Trauma And Identity Formation In Virginia Woolf’S Mrs. Dalloway And Vladimir Nabokov’S Lolita, Claire A. Setton

Theses and Dissertations

This paper delves into Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, looking at how the instability seen in the narrative structure of the novels correlates to the impact of trauma on the psychoanalytic development of the characters.

Serebrianaia Rybka Nabokova [Nabokov’S Silverfish], Victor Fet

Victor Fet

No abstract provided.

Verses And Versions, Victor Fet

Victor Fet

A review of the book: Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry Selected and Translated by Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Brian Boyd & Stanislav Shvabrin. Harcourt, 2008, 441 pp.

Резюме:

рецензия на книгу набоковских стихотворных переводов, Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry Selected and Translated by Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Brian Boyd & Stanislav Shvabrin. Harcourt, 2008, 441 pp.

Nabokov's Silverfish, Victor Fet

Victor Fet

I discuss silverfish, of Lepisma—a strange insect that crawls through many of Nabokov’s pages.

Beheading First: On Nabokov's Translation Of Lewis Carroll, Victor Fet

Victor Fet

Anya v Strane chudes, young Nabokov’s 1923 Russian translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, contains an intentionally shifted statement “beheading first, sentence later” compared to Lewis Carroll’s “sentence first, verdict later”. The shift is fitting for the 1920s children émigré audience.

An Anti-Locust Campaign In Nabokov (And Pushkin), Victor Fet

Victor Fet

Pushkin’s non-apocryphal anti-locust campaign is reflected in Nabokov’s unpublished sequel to The Gift.

Another Adelaida: Dostoevsky’S The Idiot In Nabokov’S Ada, Victor Fet, Slav N. Gratchev

Dr. Slav N. Gratchev

It appears…that Ada scholars have overlooked the only Adelaida existing in major Russian literature. It is Adelaida Yepanchina, the middle daughter of General Yepanchin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1868). All three daughters have names starting with "A": Alexandra, Adelaida, Aglaya (compare this to Nabokov's Anya-Ada-Asya).

Another Adelaida: Dostoevsky’S The Idiot In Nabokov’S Ada, Victor Fet, Slav N. Gratchev

Victor Fet

It appears…that Ada scholars have overlooked the only Adelaida existing in major Russian literature. It is Adelaida Yepanchina, the middle daughter of General Yepanchin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1868). All three daughters have names starting with "A": Alexandra, Adelaida, Aglaya (compare this to Nabokov's Anya-Ada-Asya).

"Did She Have A Precursor?": The Intertextuality Of Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night And Nabokov's Lolita, Allie Rabon Pennington

All ETDs from UAB

This thesis argues that an intertextual examination of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night and Nabokov’s Lolita complicates our understanding of Fitzgerald’s main character, Dick Diver’s sexuality by rendering his desires as similar to those of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. First, by examining the biographical histories of and connections between Fitzgerald and Nabokov, I aim to illuminate the authors’ shared influences and experiences as part of their resulting novels’ intertextual relationship. The first section of this thesis applies Lolita as a lens for reading Tender Is the Night, thus highlighting Dick Diver’s problematic sexuality and presenting his character as a precedent for …

Serebrianaia Rybka Nabokova [Nabokov’S Silverfish], Victor Fet

Biological Sciences Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

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.

Another Adelaida: Dostoevsky’S The Idiot In Nabokov’S Ada, Victor Fet, Slav N. Gratchev

Modern Languages Faculty Research

It appears…that Ada scholars have overlooked the only Adelaida existing in major Russian literature. It is Adelaida Yepanchina, the middle daughter of General Yepanchin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1868). All three daughters have names starting with "A": Alexandra, Adelaida, Aglaya (compare this to Nabokov's Anya-Ada-Asya).

Nabokov's Silverfish, Victor Fet

Biological Sciences Faculty Research

I discuss silverfish, of Lepisma—a strange insect that crawls through many of Nabokov’s pages.

Time, Photography, And Optical Technology In Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Tetyana Lyaskovets

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Time, Photography, and Optical Technology in Nabokov's Speak, Memory" Tetyana Lyaskovets discusses how Vladimir Nabokov narrates time in his autobiography by invoking photography and optical instruments. Photography and optical technology function in Speak, Memory as metaphors and probe the limits of chronological time. Nabokov portrays time as personal and reversible time that collapses the past and the present and allows one to glimpse the future. Because this temporal collapse is not possible physically but, as Nabokov believes, can be achieved through one's will, he engages optical technologies which provide a spatial form for his project to …

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.

And Then, He Folds His Patterned Rug: Repressive Reality And The Eternal Soul In Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Cook

Masters Theses

While Vladimir Nabokov has deservedly earned fame as a stylist of the strange, most critics who study his novels approach his absurd and beautiful characters as little more than fractured victims of a wholly subjective reality. Compounding the misunderstanding is the tired debate over whether or not Lolita is literary, pornographic, or some cruel game of cat-and-mouse in which Nabokov seizes control of his readers' sense of morality. However, critics who read Nabokov as nothing more than a manipulative stylist neglect to realize that his characters suffer such absurd distortions of spirit and mind because their environment--the "average" reality of …

Nabokovilia: References To Vladimir Nabokov In British And American Literature And Culture, 1960-2009, Juan Martinez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The dissertation examines allusions to the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov in the work of 147 contemporary cultural producers and – through this filter – the way in which allusion functions as symbolic capital in the field of cultural production. Critics have traditionally considered allusion a strictly localized phenomenon, but this approach – which draws upon the work of sociologists of literature such as Franco Moretti and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as the poetics of Gérard Genette – considers how a Nabokov allusion operates as an intra-authorial calling card, where Nabokov appears as an idealized, intransigent autonomous authorial figure in the …

"The Wound And The Voiceless: The Insidious Trauma Of Father-Daughter Incest In Six American Texts", Christine Lynn Grogan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cathy Caruth's pioneering study of trauma and the posttraumatic forges a connection between the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the literary as such. Since trauma defies linguistic processing, she explains, the language used to describe it will always be figural. For this reason Caruth privileges imaginative literature, with its highly mediated nature, as a means of representing the otherwise "unclaimed" experience of trauma. Her influential reflections inform a crucial direction within trauma studies: the search for a narrative voice that articulates trauma effectively.

But how should we think about trauma that is not a singular "event" but a chronic …

Verses And Versions, Victor Fet

Biological Sciences Faculty Research

A review of the book: Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry Selected and Translated by Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Brian Boyd & Stanislav Shvabrin. Harcourt, 2008, 441 pp.

Резюме:

рецензия на книгу набоковских стихотворных переводов, Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry Selected and Translated by Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Brian Boyd & Stanislav Shvabrin. Harcourt, 2008, 441 pp.

Beheading First: On Nabokov's Translation Of Lewis Carroll, Victor Fet

Biological Sciences Faculty Research

Anya v Strane chudes, young Nabokov’s 1923 Russian translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, contains an intentionally shifted statement “beheading first, sentence later” compared to Lewis Carroll’s “sentence first, verdict later”. The shift is fitting for the 1920s children émigré audience.

Faust In Lolita: Composing Sins, Souls, And Rhetorical Redemption, Aurora Mackey

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Goethe's Faust and Nabokov's Humbert both are erudite, middle-aged European scholars who, experiencing a convergence of academic and existential ennui, set eyes upon a young girl and instantly are consumed with lust. In both works the girls' widowed mothers die as a result of the protagonists' lustful intentions; a cross-country flight ensues; the once-respected scholars are wanted for murder; and Gretchen and Lolita each suffer from their sexual and emotional objectification. But the connections between Goethe's play and Nabokov's novel extend far beyond plot points, or even their decidedly different receptions in early 19th century Germany versus mid-20th century America. …

Beauty, Objectification, And Transcendence: Modernist Aesthetics In The Picture Of Dorian Gray And Pale Fire, Deborah S. Mcleod

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study compares the relation between beauty, objectification, and transcendence in two novels: Oscar Wilde's early-modernist The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Vladimir Nabokov's late-modernist Pale Fire (1962). Though written over half a century apart, the works feature similar critiques of the aesthete's devotion to beauty. While Wilde's novel offers an insider's view of aristocratic Decadence in late-nineteenth-century London, Nabokov's reflects his early influence from the Russian Symbolists and recalls that tradition in the American suburbs of the mid-twentieth-century. Both novels demonstrate the trust that many modernists held in the ability of beauty to offer transcendence over the limits …

Aesthetic Excuses And Moral Crimes: The Convergence Of Morality And Aesthetics In Nabokov's Lolita, Jennifer Elizabeth Green

English Theses

This thesis examines the debate between morality and aesthetics that is outlined by Nabokov in Lolita’s afterword. Incorporating a discussion of Lolita’s critical history in order to reveal how critics have chosen a single, limited side of the debate, either the moral or aesthetic, this thesis seeks to expose the complexities of the novel where morality and aesthetics intersect. First, the general moral and aesthetic features of Lolita are discussed. Finally, I address the two together, illustrating how Lolita cannot be categorized as immoral, amoral, or didactic. Instead, it is through the juxtaposition of form and content, parody and reality, …