Transitional Nabokov edited by Will Norman & Duncan White (review)

Transitional Nabokov grew out of a conference organized by Will Norman and Duncan White at the University of Oxford in July 2007. Its major achievement is that it offers Nabokov readers and critics the opportunity to witness emerging topics and debates in Nabokov studies. Reading Transitional Nabokov allows one to understand the mutations of the field: older trends of Nabokov criticism are reassessed, reshaped or left behind, new directions become manifest. The volume definitely proves the vitality of Nabokov criticism in an international context. Academics and critics working in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, New Zealand and Canada gathered around the main topic of the volume, “transitional Nabokov”. The adjective has plethoric meanings, thus allowing one to explore various facets of Nabokov’s work and personality: frontiers between art and science, between the verbal and non verbal, between the arts, betweeen biography and fiction, extending its meaning to the act of writing and the act of reading alike. The choice of such a topic, both vast and relevant, invites one to contemplate the hybridities, interferences, passages, and ultimately the fundamental dynamism that characterizes Nabokov’s work and the critical reception of his work.

The sixteen articles that make up the volume are organized into four distinct parts: Nabokov and Science; Transnational Nabokov; Nabokov Beyond Language; Nabokov and Ethics. A long, detailed and very useful introduction written by Will Norman and Duncan White explores the various possibilities offered by the theme and presents the articles, taking the time to dwell on the specificity of each of them and on the connections that bring together the various arguments of different authors. The ambition of the volume is to “offer fresh perspectives” on Nabokov that should grant “depth of perspective” (2) to the understanding of the subject. The two editors wish to challenge the stereotype of the “author in stasis”, that goes along with “scholastic cliché” and “calcified approaches” to his work. Ultimately, the aim is to “reinvigorate Nabokov as scholarly subject” (3). This certainly sounds extremely ambitious, but the aim is fulfilled to a great extent. As one would have expected, not each and every article is innovative, but in the end the impression one gets is one of a critical field in which new readings and approaches become unmistakably visible.

Some of the topics under scrutiny are related to older concerns in Nabokov studies: the role of science and the interplay between science and art; ethics (which goes back to Ellen Pifer’s study publihed in 1980, Nabokov and the Novel, but still continues to provoke new interrogations); the notion of belonging to one culture/literature or another; cross-cultural communication; writing in a second or third language; the problem of translation (especially self-translation) this entails. I believe that the particularly novel critical direction that emerges from this volume is that of Nabokov and transnationalism, but issues like Nabokov and science or ghosts in Nabokov, which sound familiar, continue to yield original readings. Some articles deal with lesser studied areas in Nabokov’s output, for instance the translations he did for Rachmaninoff (studied by Yuri Leving) and his plays (analyzed by Siggy Frank in relation to his fiction).

All the articles steer clear of a certain number of arguably “calcified” critical attitudes we have grown used to: to give just two examples, reading and solving riddles in Nabokov for the sake of solving them, and identifying ghostly manifestations in Nabokov’s texts. Also, one notices that there is no consensus about notions like the “tyranny of the author” and authorial control, first discussed by Maurice Couturier in 1993. While Stephen Blackwell’s article entitled “Nabokov’s Fugitive Sense” emphasizes Nabokov’s awareness of the fact that his scientific results were far from immutable and would necessarily undergo revision, other articles, like that of Siggy Frank (“‘By nature I am no dramatist’: Theatricality in Nabokov’s Fiction of the 1930s and 1940s”), deal among other things with the tension between Nabokov’s...