From the Editor
"Repeat[ing] endlessly what was, nevertheless, never said":
An introductory tribute to Professor Donald Barton Johnson
This tenth volume of Nabokov Studies not only observes the unlikely survival of the journal but also serves as a first, modest, long overdue effort toward recognizing the contributions made to Nabokov studies by this journal's founding editor, Donald Barton Johnson. Yet, I cannot help but confess to a certain unease in writing this introduction. I am reluctant to write any kind of a tribute to Don in part because doing so may suggest that Don's contribution to the journal is no longer ongoing or even necessary. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like Mary Bellino, Don continues to be a trusted and hard-working associate editor without whose skillful labors and wise counsel Nabokov Studies would have met the fate of many a print journal in the rush to digitization. My deep reluctance comes rather from the kind of light Don's scholarship throws onto the work done by the rest of us, especially those who, like me, continue (and benefit) from Don's having illuminated the way. Refraction occurs when the materials light enters are of varying densities, and scholarly light is no different. The light from Don's work bends differently for different scholars, especially since we all write on an author whose many personae or intelligences abide by the motto "I must not be overexplicit." From this editor's vantage point, the nature of scholarly refraction that occurs when one reads Don's work is summed up most suggestively by Michel Foucault's comment on the production of any discourse: "commentary's only role is to say finally that which was silently articulated elsewhere. It must—according to a paradox which it always displaces but from which it never frees itself, say for the first time what has already been said, and repeat endlessly what was, nevertheless, never said."1 [End Page vii]
The trouble for those who follow in Don's footsteps is that he somehow seems to have evaded the paradox Foucault notes while passing it on to everyone else: what Don says rarely repeats what anyone else has said, and his work shows that he has never been satisfied with surface articulations nor claimed final status for his commentaries. Those commentaries, however, always assume a foundational function. Worlds in Regression (1985) refocused Nabokov studies at both the microscopic level (attention to Nabokov's letter and word games, English and Russian) and the telescopic one (the always receding answer to "the riddle of the universe"). Over twenty years later, Don's essay on Ada's Villa Venus bordello scene in Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting (2006),2 points out the rich possibilities of reading Nabokov's works as if they were "a playground for interaction between imagination and artifact" (144), a playground where a single allusion may align, with an almost audible click, complex layers of reference from Nabokov's biography, his other fiction, lepidoptery, European literature, and Western and Japanese painting. Though Don has founded no school and gathered no converts, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, he is blessed with a generosity of mind and spirit that brings those who read his work not to him but to themselves. I can think of no other Nabokov critic who has been more influential while expending as little effort on exerting his influence. Because he has shrugged off all efforts to box him in methodologically and ideologically, assessing Don's influence in the field of Nabokov studies would require a good deal more stamina, vanity, soul-searching, and space than I can afford at the moment. So rather than spend any more of my allotted space disguising my efforts to dodge my own many anxieties of influence, I have called on Brian Boyd and Sam Schuman, two Nabokov scholars whose generosity to incoming Nabokovians and old hands alike is, like Don's, legendary, to provide the first formal tributes. [End Page viii]
Four of the ten...
