Nabokov at Cornell

Vladimir Nabokov taught at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959. It was at Cornell that Nabokov composed Lolita and Pnin and conceived Pale Fire. During his Cornell tenure Nabokov also continued his research on lepidoptera, wrote the English and Russian versions of his autobiography, Conclusive Evidence and Drugie Berega, and prepared annotated translations of two pinnacles of Russian literature: The Song of Igor's Campaign and Eugene Onegin. While at Cornell Nabokov also delivered his highly acclaimed lectures on Russian and West European literature. Nabokov at Cornell contains twenty-five chapters by the leading experts on Nabokov. Their subjects range widely from Nabokov's poetry to his prose, from his original fiction to translation and literary scholarship, from literature to visual art, and from the humanities to natural science. The book concludes with a reminiscence of the family's life in Ithaca by Nabokov's son, Dmitri.

"Dimitri Nabokov's meditation on the family's Cornell years, a period in which his father was extraordinarily productive, constitutes an ideal postscript for the volume. In it, he manages to be both witty and profoundly moving, the former when he speaks of the labor involved in fending off those who seek to profit unfairly from Nabokov's books, the latter when he tells of the love that has kept him to it.", "One of the most encouraging and decisive signs of the maturity of Nabokov scholarship is that in this volume, packed as it is with twenty-five essays written by people who have devoted years to the study and love of this author, not one of the apes Nabokov's own style of writing. Nor do they angrily denounce what he denounces, nor take for granted his claims about the nature of literature or even his own work. Still less do they rebel against Nabokov as against an overbearing father. They take him for what he was: a tremendously complex, precise, elusive, ecstatic writer.... Nabokov's visual prowess, in both observation and description, is justly renowned, and this book offers several angles of vision. Dirig gives us Nabokov the painstaking lepidopterist; Shapiro identifies elements of fine arts (early Netherlandish painting) in Nabokov's work; and Clarence Brown describes a mode of vision based on the comic strip, which he convincingly establishes as one of Nabokov's important techniques of visual presentation.... Nabokov is a recent enough writer that there are many living memories of him, and a distant enough writer that those memories should be recorded soon. This is not a volume of memoirs, but the generous personal recollections of Dirig, Brown, Parker, and Dimitry Nabokov help round out the trenchant theoretical and interpretive aspects of the book."

Gavriel Shapiro is Professor in the Department of Russian at Cornell University. He is the author of Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage and Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov's 'Invitation to a Beheading.'