REPRESENTATION OF SUFFERING IN SELECTED WORKS BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV (original) (raw)
Related papers
Nabokov and the Russian Tradition: Americanizing the Pravednitsa in Laugther in the Dark and Lolita
This essay focuses on probing the complexities of Dostoevsky’s influence on Nabokov through the consideration of female characters in Laughter in the Dark and Lolita. The discussion centers on the development of characters and on the issue of the apotheosis of the Russian woman, which Nabokov inherits from Dostoevsky, as both are members of the ‘lesser tradition’ in Russian literature. Through the discussion of key concepts such as poshlost and the figure of pravednisa, the essay articulates the main intertextual similarities and differences between the writers, positing that Nabokov developed the stock female characters through adding dimensionality through them and giving them status as people in their own right, something that Dostoevsky did not aspire to in his Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment, despite his focus on morality. The discussion is focused mainly on mothers and children by way of exploring the central issue of cancelled children and mothers in both Laughter in the Dark and Lolita. I argue that despite Nabokov’s protestations against his precursor, Dostoevsky had a tangible impact on his works that informed the former’s portrayal of his heroines. Nabokov took the tradition further, however, by transporting and transplanting these figures into an American milieu, which imbues the notion of poshlost and the pravednitsa figure with new meanings, as the women have the possibility to encounter American consumerism of the mid-20th century.
Introduction: the many faces of Vladimir Nabokov
2005
Vladimir Nabokov was acutely aware of the image that readers and critics held of him. Deriding the notion that he was a “frivolous firebird,” he predicted that the day would come when someone would declare him to be a “rigid moralist kicking sin” and “assigning power to tenderness, talent, and pride” (SO, 193). Not only did Nabokov’s prediction come true, but critics continue to discover new facets of the writer’s legacy to highlight and explore. As a result, it has become clear that the man and his work evince enormous complexity. The facile labels applied to Nabokov early in his career – the “cool aesthete,” “impassive gamester” – have been replaced by other labels (if not “rigid moralist,” then “highly ethical” writer, metaphysician, philosopher). Yet all of these labels are proving to be simply one-dimensional; the full depth of Nabokov’s talent has yet to be plumbed. Indeed, in recent years, new aspects of Nabokov’s formidable intellectual legacy, such as his research as a lepi...
“Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature and the Shaping of Lolita.”
In: Lolita: Critical Insights, edited by Rachel Stauffer, pp. 27-44. Ipswich, Mass.: Grey House Publishing/Salem Press, 2016
Lolita is well known as Nabokov’s most “American” novel, cementing his success as an American writer, paving the road to international fame, and famously highlighting the thorough knowledge of American culture that he acquired during years of residence in the United States. The author himself further accentuated his connection to the U.S. in subsequent interviews and autobiographical writings, downplaying the multiple layers of Russian culture that helped to shape his novel. Indeed, the extent to which this most American of novels sinks its roots deep into Russian literary tradition often escapes readers’ notice. Nonetheless, even while reinventing himself as an American writer, Nabokov continued to re-elaborate elements from the Russian texts that he knew well, echoing and often parodying antecedent images, bits of plot, literary personages, and narrative structures; the densely allusive Lolita, which has been described as postmodern for its numerous references to and sustained parallels with prior literary texts, is a case in point. This chapter outlines Lolita’s fundamental connection to several classic works from nineteenth-century Russian literature by outlining some of the multiple intertextual connections between that novel and its classic predecessors, specifically those authors and works whose themes, paradigms, and personages are relatively well-known – over and above their resonance in Lolita – and are especially likely to be familiar to students. It illuminates a part of Nabokov’s own cultural background, makes Pushkin, Gogol’, Lermontov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy more clearly relevant for readers of Lolita, and engages students of the Russian nineteenth-century classics with issues of that tradition’s continuity into the next century. As will become clear, the dubious psychological state of Lolita’s protagonist, his perverse sexual desires, the techniques by which his character and crimes are revealed to the reader, and also the entanglement of identity involving author, authorial persona, and other literary personages may all be linked to Russian antecedents.
Nabokov’s Critics: a Review Article
Several insights should by now be clear to all students of Nabokov who have assimilated the critical literature of the past twenty years: that he is a Romantic who views this world as a parody of the otherworld, causing his works to abound in doublings, mirrorings, and inversions; that the glimmerings of another existence beyond our own may occasionally be discerned in nature, in fate's workings, in art; and that the puzzles and rich referentiality of Nabokov's texts to other literature are designed to send the reader on a quest for the transcendent.
Nabokov's Freedom: An Uneven Battle against the Sinister Narrator
With the recent inclination toward reading for ideological aspects of his works, Nabokov, who had been pervasively regarded as a mere ingenious aesthete, both during his life and for a long time after his death, has proved more puzzling in interpretation than what scholars believed. In this research, in order to understand what concept of freedom Nabokov has developed in his Bend Sinister, we focus on the two of his salient concerns: reality and individuality. Consequently, our narratological reading of Bend Sinister is concentrated first on the interpretation of the whatness of reality and its contribution to realize freedom, and second on analyzing the significance of retaining individuality to procure freedom; ultimately, out of delving into these two issues, the concept of freedom that the narrative techniques of the novel render, in correspondence to the peculiarities of the mid-twentieth century, is found out. Regarding the notion of the reality, in this novel, the unremitting propaganda of the totalitarian system presented the materialistic world as the ultimate truth, confining citizens in the prison of a fake world and not permitting them to gain the slightest awareness of the endless freedom possible in eternity. As to the individuality, Krug's attempts not to succumb to the desired system of padograph lead him to maintain his individuality and partly realize his freedom of mind. And finally, it is shown how totalitarianism has reached such absolute power that no thorough freedom of mind is now conceivable for humanity.
The paper studies on the depiction and representation of nymphet's sexuality in Vladimir Nabokov's novel 'Lolita'. Lolita's sexuality as nymphet is depicted as a normal. Although, many reviews and critics in the past time judged Lolita's sexuality as depravity and deviant, this postulation is no longer considered as being right concomitantly with the development of knowledge in the field of sexuality (sexology) and the revelation of subjectivity theory. Moreover, there are another finding that someone's sexuality will be influenced by the hereditary, environments and experience. Lolita's sexuality also represents a nymphet's sexuality prototype in the 21 st century society. It becomes the proof of the finding when the novel published for the first time, there was a furor toward the theme of nymphet's sexuality. Now, the nymphet's sexuality which is drawn in the novel becomes common sexual activity in many nymphet's life.
[2016] Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: Text, Paratext, and Translation
2016
This article addresses the relationship between text and paratext in the publication history of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Such paratexts include Nabokov’s own afterword to the 1958 American edition and his postscript (published in 1967) to his own translation of Lolita into Russian, as well as various introductions and afterwords, both in English-language editions and in translations of Lolita into Russian and other languages. A particularly interesting type of paratext is constituted by annotations to the main text, and the analysis focuses on parallel examples published in annotated editions of Lolita in English, Russian, Polish, German, Ukrainian, and French. The analysis shows that the most detailed annotations concerning the totality of the English and Russian Lolita text and paratexts can be found in editions published in languages other than English and Russian, whereas most English or Russian editions seem to focus on the respective language version. There is still no complete, annotated edition of the bilingual text containing all the authorial paratexts.