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Reviews 209 All this is not to suggest that Nabokov does not owe anything in his shortstory -telling techniques to either Chekhov or Bunin. He does, and a thorough study of that (as well as of the influence of the short stories by Pushkin and Gogol) would be quite appropriate, but it is an entirely different topic, and Shrayer needs to do much more thinking and research if he wants to pursue it in a serious fashion. His approach at this point appears rather superficial. Every year I teach a survey 20th-century Russian literature class where I use Clarence Brown's anthology, and thus my students read both Bunin's "Light Breathing" and Nabokov's "The Return of Chorb." They too notice a certain similarity between "Chorb" and this particular story of Bunin's, which Shrayer singles out as one of the two "literary models" (66) (the other being Chekhov's "The Lady with a Lap Dog") Nabokov was likely to admire and be influenced by. They often even write papers comparing the two (something along the lines of an untimely death of a young beautiful woman and the making of a myth or a legend) and, if they do it well, receive good grades. But from Shrayer we obviously can and should expect much more than that. Shrayer truly excels in putting "flesh" on Nabokov's stories. Doing my own research on the Nabokovs in Prague, I came across his intriguing analysis of "A Russian Beauty" as modeled on the life and character of Nabokov's sister Olga ("Olga" is, of course, the name of the story's protagonist as well). I wish it—and similar little gems of discovery, based on travels, interviews, archival materials—could have replaced the disappointing last chapters of The World of Nabokov's Stories. If Maxim Shrayer ever chooses to revise his first book, I do hope that is exactly what he does. Stephen H. Blackwell. Zina 's Paradox: The Figured Reader in Nabokov's Gift. Middlebury Studies in Russian Language and Literature, Vol. 23. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 215 pp. ISBN 0820448834. Review by Paul D. Morris, Universität des Saarlandes. With his monograph Zina 's Paradox: The Figured Reader in Nabokov's Gift, Stephen H. Blackwell presents Nabokov scholarship with the first thematic study devoted to Vladimir Nabokov's final, and perhaps finest, Russian novel. Just for rendering this scholarly service, Blackwell deserves credit. For The Gift presents criticism with no easy task. Although a novel eminently worthy of study, given its artistic wealth and thematic expansiveness, it presents the critic with a daunting array of themes in any number of contexts according to any number of topics. Out of this multitude of potential contexts and topics, Blackwell, as his title indicates, has settled upon the issue of reading and, in particular, the purportedly key role Zina plays in shaping the narrative perspective of the novel. In developing his approach, Blackwell consciously sets about offering an interpretive, non-traditional reading of 210 Nabokov Studies Zina's function in the novel, a reading which assumes implications for a whole range of structural and thematic concerns. Zina 's Paradox, then, is a book which seeks, above all, to document and demonstrate a single new reading rather than offer a comprehensive account of the novel. Thus, the "Introduction" and six chapters comprising the book, while treating the issues raised by Blackwell's central thesis, are designed to support an argument focused on Zina's role as a "shaping, artistic force" in the novel. This provocative thesis Blackwell boldly sets forth in his introduction, stating that "the text comes to us through Zina's perspective as a creative partner, as a loving participant in the artistic process" (1). The gesture of identifying Zina as a creative partner is reinforced still further in Blackwell's concrete suggestion of her direct participation in the development of the novel: "not only is Zina its ideal reader, but her voice as reader is woven into the text's fabric... Fyodor's novel The Gift is processed, molded, and shaped by Zina ... the novel is not only Fyodor's but Zina's, too; we perceive his creation through...

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