Project MUSE®: Nabokov Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/257
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Nabokov Studies.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1994) through current issueLatest Articles: Nabokov StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Nabokov Studies1548-99651080-1219Latest articles in Nabokov Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®From the Editors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977965
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Welcome to this landmark volume of Nabokov Studies, a collection that not only deepens our engagement with Vladimir Nabokov’s literary universe but also reveals the remarkable breadth and resilience of his influence across disciplines, methodologies, and emotional registers. Here, we find essays that traverse the cinematic, the cognitive, the autistic, the ethical, the archivally hidden, and the semiotically labyrinthine—each one a unique aperture through which Nabokov’s work refracts with renewed intensity.The essays assembled here represent both individual scholarship and outline a constellation of converging interests that confirm a continuously evolving critical landscape. We observe, first, yet another
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/257/image/coversmallFrom the Editors2025-12-17text/htmlen-USFrom the Editors2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®69332026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17The Writing of Imagination: Analysis of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Terra Incognita” and Invitation to a Beheading
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977967
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Contemporaries of Vladimir Nabokov pointed out the writer’s close-knit relationship with cinematographic art starting from the publication of his first novels. Critics and scholars have mostly focused on the biographic, sociologic, and thematic levels of this relationship, which deserves an in-depth investigation at the stylistic level as well. Indeed, exploring the connection between cinematographic devices and narrative techniques allows us to identify new aspects of Nabokov’s writing and of the sense of continuous experimentation that it conveys. Cinema has often inspired writers to narrate stories in an objective and factual way. Ernest Hemingway, for instance, wrote novels based on the brief scenes and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/257/image/coversmallThe Writing of Imagination: Analysis of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Terra Incognita” and Invitation to a Beheading2025-12-17text/htmlen-USThe Writing of Imagination: Analysis of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Terra Incognita” and Invitation to a Beheading2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®1352782026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17The Potter and His Mark: Reading Conclusive Evidence and Pnin Archivally
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977968
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Before Lolita (1955, American edition 1958) became his signature Anglophone book, Nabokov was primarily known to American readers as the author of Conclusive Evidence (1951) and Pnin (1957), published in installments in popular magazines—most regularly, in The New Yorker. The two works complemented one another in a peculiar way. Not only did the Cornell professor, whose yearning for the Russia of his childhood and youth was the focal point of the autobiography, beget the hapless Russian academic Tim Pnin, but he also brought to life his own fictional double—Pnin’s chronicler, tormentor, and usurper “Vladimir Vladimirovich.” In a sense, the narrator of Pnin is an aberration of the biographical principle: V. V.’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/257/image/coversmallThe Potter and His Mark: Reading Conclusive Evidence and Pnin Archivally2025-12-17text/htmlen-USThe Potter and His Mark: Reading Conclusive Evidence and Pnin Archivally2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®834012026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17The Straitjacket of Normality: The Downfall of an Autistic Chess Genius in The Defense
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977969
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There are many novels in which chess plays a central role, but few have been as successful as Nabokov’s early novel The Defense. Unlike most other chess novels, The Defense manages to evoke an atmosphere that is credible and convincing to both the layman and the experienced chess player. No wonder this novel is much loved by professional as well as amateur chess players.1 The somewhat solitary child who, to the despair of his parents, is more interested in the chess pieces than in his friends; the later withdrawn young man who becomes as dedicated to chess as he is alienated from the world; and the obsessive chess fever that accompanies all of this: Nabokov depicts these images and feelings in a recognizable and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/257/image/coversmallThe Straitjacket of Normality: The Downfall of an Autistic Chess Genius in The Defense2025-12-17text/htmlen-USThe Straitjacket of Normality: The Downfall of an Autistic Chess Genius in The Defense2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®543892026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17The Barber of Kasbeam (Continued): Ethics and Affect in Nabokov’s Lolita
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977970
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Lolita is a moral book. This point has been convincingly argued many times throughout Nabokov criticism. Many critics, however, have neglected engaging with Lolita’s affective qualities when discussing the book’s ethical value. Alfred Appel, Jr., arguably Nabokov’s most influential early critic, sees Lolita’s “moral dimension” (in AnLo lxiv–lxv) as best encapsulated by Humbert’s “moral apotheosis” (450–451). Appel interprets the “apotheosis” passage as Hum-bert’s “realization of the loss suffered not by him but by Lolita,” reading it as the only one in the novel that is “in no way undercut by parody or qualified by irony” (lxiv). The passage is “so uniquely straightforward” that itconstitutes the end game and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/257/image/coversmallThe Barber of Kasbeam (Continued): Ethics and Affect in Nabokov’s Lolita2025-12-17text/htmlen-USThe Barber of Kasbeam (Continued): Ethics and Affect in Nabokov’s Lolita2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®629052026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17Symmetry, Synchrony, and Tree Structures: Cognitive Approaches to Narrative Form and Pattern Recognition in Nabokov’s Pale Fire
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977971
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Pale Fire is one of Nabokov’s most intricately crafted works, celebrated for its complex structure and interwoven narratives. The novel comprises a foreword by Charles Kinbote, a lengthy poem titled “Pale Fire” by the poet John Shade, and Kinbote’s extensive commentary and index on the poem. While often interpreted as a work of literary commentary or academic satire, less attention has been given to Nabokov’s play with narrative patterns and the concept of pattern recognition within the text. In Pale Fire, a convergence emerges between scientific notions of pattern recognition and the act of artistic creation, highlighting the intersection of literature and cognition.This study addresses three central questions:
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/257/image/coversmallSymmetry, Synchrony, and Tree Structures: Cognitive Approaches to Narrative Form and Pattern Recognition in Nabokov’s Pale Fire2025-12-17text/htmlen-USSymmetry, Synchrony, and Tree Structures: Cognitive Approaches to Narrative Form and Pattern Recognition in Nabokov’s Pale Fire2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®1493122026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17Bodies of High Style: Insight and Form in Lawrence Durrell and Vladimir Nabokov
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977972
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“Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this im-mobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces, the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time and harvest, of the reapers bending
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/257/image/coversmallBodies of High Style: Insight and Form in Lawrence Durrell and Vladimir Nabokov2025-12-17text/htmlen-USBodies of High Style: Insight and Form in Lawrence Durrell and Vladimir Nabokov2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®1022742026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17The Zemblan Treasure: Whose Is It?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977973
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For over fifty years, scholars of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) have debated the nature and location of the “Zemblan treasure” referenced throughout Charles Kinbote’s commentaries. The novel even depicts Soviet “experts” searching the palace walls for hidden crown jewels (C130/107; C681/193; C741/237).1 However, no treasure appears in the narrative; Kinbote flees Zembla without material riches. The treasure does exist, however, but as a lexical structure, not as a narrative element. Nabokov embedded it in the “brickwork” of his language. There are many words in the text that have to do with money and wealth. For example, “fortune” is used 19 times, and “gold” 30 times. There are also large groups of words for
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/257/image/coversmallThe Zemblan Treasure: Whose Is It?2025-12-17text/htmlen-USThe Zemblan Treasure: Whose Is It?2025-12-172025TWOProject MUSE®935882026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-17