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Overview
Vladimir Nabokov taught at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959. It was at Cornell that Nabokov composed Lolita and Pnin and conceived Pale Fire. During his Cornell tenure Nabokov also continued his research on lepidoptera, wrote the English and Russian versions of his autobiography, Conclusive Evidence, and Drugie Berega, and prepared annotated translations of two pinnacles of Russian literature: The Song of Igor's Campaign and Eugene Onegin. While at Cornell, Nabokov also delivered his highly acclaimed lectures on Russian and West European literature.
Nabokov at Cornell contains twenty-five chapters by the leading experts on Nabokov. Their subjects range widely from Nabokov's poetry to his prose, from his original fiction to translation and literary scholarship, from literature to visual art, and from the humanities to natural science. The book concludes with a reminiscence of the family's life in Ithaca by Nabokov's son, Dmitri.
Contributors: Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Yale University; Stephen H. Blackwell, University of Tennessee; Brian Boyd, University of Aukland; Clarence F. Brown, Princeton University; Julian W. Connolly, University of Virginia; Sergei Davydov, Middlebury College; Nina Demurova, University of Russian Academy of Education; Robert Dirig, Cornell University; John Burt Foster, Jr., George Mason University; D. Barton Johnson, UC Santa Barbara; Marina Kanevskaya, University of Montana; John M. Kopper, Dartmouth College; Zoran Kuzmanovich, Davidson College; Dmitri Nabokov; Charles Nicol, Indiana State University; Stephen Jan Parker, University of Kansas; Ellen Pifer, University of Delaware; Irena Ronen, University of Michigan; Omry Ronen, University of Michigan; Christine A. Rydel, Grand Valley State University; Gavriel Shapiro, Cornell University; Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, College of the Holy Cross; Leona Toker, Hebrew University; Joanna Maria Trzeciak, University of Chicago Lisa Zunshine, University of Kentucky
Synopsis
To celebrate the centenary of his birth, Cornell, where Nabokov taught for ten years, held the Cornell Nabokov Centenary Festival in September 1998 in Ithaca, New York, from which this volume is the result. Scholars on Nabokov (as well as an entomologist who contributed an article on one of the butterflies named by him) from the US, New Zealand, and Israel have written 23 essays on Nabokov's years in Russia, in the US, his scientific pursuits, and his work in translation. Individual topics include sources of Despair, theory and narrative in "Signs and symbols", Nabokov on Malraux's La condition humaine, and Nabokov on early Netherlandish art. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Dimitri Nabokov's meditation on the family's Cornell years, a period in which his father was extraordinarily productive, constitutes an ideal postscript for the volume. In it, he manages to be both witty and profoundly moving, the former when he speaks of the labor involved in fending off those who seek to profit unfairly from Nabokov's books, the latter when he tells of the love that has kept him to it."-David Rampton, University of Ottawa, Slavic Review, Summer 2004"One of the most encouraging and decisive signs of the maturity of Nabokov scholarship is that in this volume, packed as it is with twenty-five essays written by people who have devoted years to the study and love of this author, not one of the apes Nabokov's own style of writing. Nor do they angrily denounce what he denounces, nor take for granted his claims about the nature of literature or even his own work. Still less do they rebel against Nabokov as against an overbearing father. They take him for what he was: a tremendously complex, precise, elusive, ecstatic writer. . . . Nabokov's visual prowess, in both observation and description, is justly renowned, and this book offers several angles of vision. Dirig gives us Nabokov the painstaking lepidopterist; Shapiro identifies elements of fine arts (early Netherlandish painting) in Nabokov's work; and Clarence Brown describes a mode of vision based on the comic strip, which he convincingly establishes as one of Nabokov's important techniques of visual presentation. . . . Nabokov is a recent enough writer that there are many living memories of him, and a distant enough writer that those memories should be recorded soon. This is not a volume of memoirs, but the generous personal recollections of Dirig, Brown, Parker, and Dimitry Nabokov help round out the trenchant theoretical and interpretive aspects of the book."-Tim Langen, University of Missouri, Russian Review, 63:1, Jan. 2004