From the Editor

Nabokov Studies 4 (1997) From the Editor Demands of space require that this column be brief. It will be. Instead of the usual reflections on some "significant problem " generated by the commonalities among the essays that were not published, I will limit my remarks to descriptions of the essays that make up this volume. Dividing its space almost evenly among established scholars and relative newcomers to the field, Volume 4 of Nabokov Studies brings one more reminder that Nabokov studies does not assimilate readily to a single critical discourse. Nor is there even a hint of thematic conformity despite the lively tug-of-war between intellectual rigor and generosity, the attendant tensions that characterized the process of editorial intervention for this volume (making that process almost twice as long as that required by Volume 3). Quite simply, when the dust raised by methodological jousting settles, it becomes clear that because the definitions of what is central to Nabokov studies continue to undergo complex shifts, both the center and the margin, tradition and innovation, Russian and English, Nabokov's early and later works exert their profound contextual "pull" in this volume. And that is as it should be. Such balance is desirable. Donald Barton Johnson concerns himself with origins and in a neat bit of detective work unearths the crossing where butterfly hunting, scholarship, and biography met to produce a Smurov the modalities of whose being take their contours both from the "climactic conditions prevailing in various souls" and from butterfly systematics. Where Johnson searches for Nabokov's models in historical and scientific reality, Julian Connolly turns to literature and in a subtle and convincing influence study finds that in Lolita viii Nabokov Studies Nabokov has appropriated the lurid and solipsistic despair of Dostoevsky's "The Gentle Creature" in order to use it for an entirely original purpose—as a springboard for "an affirmation of timeless beauty. " Inverting the approach used by Connolly, Priscilla Meyer seeks internal rather than external analogues and finds that in parodying the Doppelgänger theme Nabokov had constructed a complex system of echoes and inversions that bind Despair and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in fascinating ways. Taking the same "inward" path, Svetlana Polsky rescues Nabokov's short story "Easter Rain" from archival oblivion only to find that it is but the first of a series of multilingual excursions into the realm where autobiography relies on the full resources of fiction for one of the noblest human goals—preservation. The Russian "Easter Rain" (1925) would reappear in complex disguises as first French (1936) and then English (1943) "Mademoiselle 0." and continue to manifest itself in Conclusive Evidence (1951), Drugie berega (1954), resettling into its final English form in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1966). The multiple tentacles Nabokov ascribes to fate preoccupy Stephen Blackwell as he teases out the "poetics of fate" from the act of reading that Nabokov thematizes as an exploit the point of which "is not so much a vision of ultimate reality" but "a series of metaphors for a vision which remains largely unexpressed. " While the essays of both Anat Ben-Amos and Anna Brodsky center on The Gift and occasionally appear to echo and extend each other, they are more profitably read as set in potential dialogue. What is at stake is nothing less than the claim for the ability of literature (and specifically Nabokov's art) to constitute , transform, and replace reality. The common complaint against structuralist critics that they talk only to each other may not be lodged against Vladimir MyI- From the Editor ix nikov's essay. Innocent of any post-structuralist air of connoisseurship , Mylnikov's text-book structuralism shows why "Christmas" is one of Nabokov's best stories: its details still invite and reward the re-reader. This essay itself in many ways hearkens back nostalgically to a model of scholarship established by war-isolated Eric Auerbach—a scholar working by himself on a single work without the burden of the sometimes paralyzing but certainly always attenuating critical apparatus of non-literary discourses we now take for granted. Though not commissioned, unless provocation is synonymous with commission, Brian Boyd's Forum piece is an impassioned...