From the editor

In the last two years, it has become customary to blame delays on COVID. The delay in publication of this volume of Nabokov Studies is not to be blamed only on COVID but on the editor's losing battle with uveitis and damaged optic nerves. While both COVID and the loss of sight remain a serious threat, the delay they caused has also had some benefits. The reviews the essays published in this volume received from their specialist readers were the lengthiest, the most thoughtful, and the most positive, making my job at once easier (editing) and much more difficult (selecting among vetted essays). For the readers of this journal, the delay is compensated by the rich mixture of essays from both newcomers to Nabokov studies and some very old and very sure hands. What makes that mixture rich is the clarity and seriousness of purpose among the articles as well as the elegant, passionate, and often witty display of the knowledge gained by following a particular curiosity about the unexplored areas of Nabokov's work.

Rather than writing the kind of foreword that not only anticipates but interprets what follows and thus duplicates the work better left to the Abstracts, I will try to situate each essay without offering a key reading of it. So if you are looking to read only the Foreword and skip the rest, I advise against such a strategy. It may be wiser to read the foreword after reading the essays, especially if you were among those whose essays were not selected for publication.

Brendan Nieubuurt's prize-winning essay treats Cincinnatus's diary as anticipating Derrida's reconceptualizing of Plato's notions of the incompatibility of speech (politics) and writing (poetics). Discussions of Derrida's key terms are often confused and confusing (is speech an activity, a product of an activity or the psychological/aesthetic effect of such activities and products?) Nieubuurt admirably avoids such a confusion by concentrating on what he calls "uncanny" harmonies between Invitation to a Beheading and Derrida's work.

Jeremy Stewart offers a lesson on the ways knowledge of Nabokov's other works serves to limit possible proposed solutions to the riddles of Lolita and thus also provides something we pretend to avoid these days: a measuring stick for validity of interpretations.

Another Nabokov Foundation prizewinner, Erik Eklund, looks at the ways Nabokov's epidiegetic statements about Lolita challenge particular modes of interpretation. Using Nabokov's punishment/ redemption paradigm for Humbert, Eklund invites discussions of Nabokov's work as θεουργία, the ritual propitiation of beneficence.

Savely Senderovich and Yelena Shvarts discuss the white magic of Nabokov's major motifs in Lolita and conclude that such magic is unexplainable or irreducible but decidedly still there, functioning almost as hieroglyphs do.

Following D.B. Johnson on "ultima Thule" and Nabokov himself on his dreams, Jennifer Sears looks at dreams in "Ultima Thule" and "Solus Rex" as pre-cognitive hieroglyphs pointing to an aperture that may lead to the solution of some ultimate riddle. What makes those hieroglyphs fascinating for a student of Nabokov's style is that they often also happen to be apostrophes delivered at the interstice of the conscious and the unconscious.

Making his way through the thicket of "Signs and Symbols" interpretations, Eric Naiman addresses himself to the presumption, theory, or ideology that maintains narration as invisible but the characters as real. He discerns in the verbal activity of the narrator in "Signs and Symbols" a malevolent presence connected with the power of numbers to do harm.

Johan Warodell's list of 300+ animal species in Nabokov's works is an invitation to further research. At the risk od sounding like Kinbote, I confess (without necessarily suggesting that animal studies should be the next direction in Nabokov scholarship) that I have always been interested in Nabokov's scenes that contain torture of animals. I have never been satisfied with my answer to the question "To what are such scenes aesthetically appropriate background or juxtaposition?" Warodell's invitation is issued in the spirit of Nabokov's insistence that reality is a matter of layers and stages, a "kind of gradual...