From the Editor:

In his 1964 interview with Alvin Toffler, Nabokov issued an invitation to Joyce scholars in a manner we now associate with contrarian clickbaiting: "James Joyce's mistake in those otherwise marvelous mental soliloquies of his consists in that he gives too much verbal body to thoughts." Please note that the interview was being conducted for Playboy magazine, a home to bodies more than just verbal. It is difficult to think of Molly's thoughts in Ulysses as a mistake, though they teem with images of polymorphously positioned bodies, and the very quality Nabokov sees as a mistake has been singled out in La Venue à l'écriture as an example of "écriture féminine" par excellence. The unwillingness of the Joyce scholars to take the bait is understandable. But the sentence that preceded Nabokov's assessment of Joyce's writing is even more inviting to the scholars of Nabokov's own work: "We think not in words but in shadows of words." Nabokov's habitual derision of Freudian approaches to literature had kept many a critic inclined to psychological approaches of any sort from responding to invitations of that kind. Although, as Brian Boyd pointed out, Nabokov also thought that "All novelists of any worth are psychological novelists," very few pieces have been written on Nabokov and psychology. The notable exceptions—the work of Maurice Couturier in France, and Geoffrey Green and Jennifer Shute in the U.S.—have received more of respectful whistle than a wide discussion. Couturier's work is only now being translated on the scale it deserves. This volume of Nabokov Studies is an effort to redress past omissions and thus open the doors wider for serious scholars of Nabokov and psychology. Although not every essay in the volume centers on Nabokov and psychology, those that do offer some thought-provoking glimpses of the verbal bodies romping in the shadows of Nabokov's own words.