Nabokov at Cornell (review)

The occasion for this volume was the Cornell Nabokov Centenary Festival, held in Ithaca, New York, on September 10-12, 1998, "to mark the jubilee of Nabokov's advent at Cornell and his then approaching centenary" (Shapiro: xi). The last decade has seen a veritable Sturm und Drang in Nabokov studies, reviewed in Stephen Jan Parker's "Nabokov Studies: The State of the Art Revisited," the penultimate article of the volume. As the co-editor (with George Gibian) of The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov, which presented the materials from the first Nabokov Festival held at Cornell in 1983, Parker can assert that now "Nabokov criticism has burgeoned into a vigorous growth industry, not only in terms of books, but also in hundreds and hundreds of articles, chapters, essays, notes, and reviews in various languages —not to mention the new electronic dimension of inquiry and shared information on the Internet" (269). Apparently, this hermeneutic proliferation is also a form of interpretative response to Nabokov as a complex cultural phenomenon. Accordingly, Nabokov at Cornell attempts to reflect "the great diversity of the interests of Nabokov —perhaps the last Renaissance man" (Shapiro xii). It is divided into five parts —"The Russian Years," "The American Years," "The Miraculous Amphora," "The Glorious Output," and "The Thrill of Science and the Pleasure of Art," dealing, respectively, with Russian and American novels, the Cornell lectures on Russian and world literature, and the place of science and painting in Nabokov's oeuvre.

In "The Fourth Dimension of Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark," Vladimir E. Alexandrov suggests, with some reservations, a possible influence of the Russian occultist P. D. Uspenskii's ideas about "Fourth Dimension" on Nabokov. With reference to his previous comments on this issue,¹ Alexandrov points to an episode from Laughter in the Dark that suggests a connection with Uspenskii's treatise Tertium Organum. Though the article ends by cautiously raising the possibility that Uspenskii "was more of a mediating than a direct influence on Nabokov" (9), it seems that since writers of formative significance for Nabokov's generation, such as Valerii Briusov, Andrei Bely, and Nikolai Gumilev, were, indeed, engaged in a range of occult practices, positioning the young poet Sirin in a wider context of mystically syncretic Russian modernism could be very fruitful.

In "Sources of Nabokov's Despair," D. Barton Johnson researches Russian émigré press accounts of contemporary European insurance-fraud schemes as a background for Herman's crime. Dostoevsky, the main anxiety-figure for the author of Despair, had not disdained to draw subjects for his novels from the yellow press of his day. It seems that Despair developed against a Dostoevskian model from its very beginning, with a newspaper account as a nucleus of the formative idea. The article presents, among other things, a method of including culturally marginalized fields into the intermedial approach to canonical literature.

Intermediality is also dealt with in Clarence Brown's "Krazy, Ignatz, and Vladimir: Nabokov and the Comic Strip," which reveals "the slight traces of sequential pictorial narrative (another way to say comic strip) that crop up in the fabric of [Nabokov's] imaginary world, usually as a part of the décour rather than as the foreground action" (251). Brown's appellation for this compositional element is the "bédesque" coined from the French "la bande dessinée." As an example of the "bédesque" the article offers a comic strip of "little Emmie's perfidious drawing in Invitation to a Beheading . . . which seems to hold out to Cincinnatus a plan of escape" (262). In liveliness, this comic strip can compete with the colorful insets of the volume, including a photo of Male Karner Blue, a butterfly caught by Nabokov at Karne on June 2, 1950.

Returning to intermedial Nabokov, cinema studies are represented by Ellen Pifer's "Reinventing Nabokov: Lyne and Kubrick Parse Lolita." Pifer argues that neither cinematic adaptation can sustain the original equipoise of Lolita: "Where Nabokov generates comedy out of despair and tragedy out of farce, Lyne and Kubrick each develop only one of the...