Shakeeb Arzoo in Kolkata, India, has done a selfless and heroic job of checking, regularizing and adding links and information to all the material in the existing secondary Nabokov bibliography. This had had many glitches from its original compilation and as a consequence of the complex job (undertaken by Dmitry and Alina Kirsanov) of transferring it from one computer system to a very different one. As a result of Shakeeb’s energetic, comprehensive, thorough and careful work we have appointed him Editor of the Secondary Bibliography.
This Bibliography will be one of the main resources of the website, if we keep adding to it. Its landing page has been made much clearer.
Once again can I ask you to please add to the bibliography from your own publications or your own bibliographic files. The more up-to-date and complete it is, the more useful it will be for all, and the more people will wish to add to it.
If you feel daunted by the process of adding or editing an entry (although it’s really quite straightforward), you may email Shakeeb to send him the information.
For all the scale of the bibliography imported from Zembla, it was incomplete even up to the date that material ceased to be added, back in 2009. It omitted, for instance, Graham Vickers’s wonderful book on the reception of Lolita—on the almost universal incomprehension and degradation of her character in popular culture.
You can also add abstracts or summaries, comments, tags, and you can even upload pdfs of the material if you have the right to do so. See, for example, my 1987 letter to the Editor of the TLS about the false attribution of Novel with a Cocaine to Nabokov (scroll to the bottom of the details), including a contemporary comment in a 1934 letter from Nabokov to Khodasevich that amusingly confirms Nabokov’s distance from the style of the novel and the editorial standards of Chisla.
Living in Kolkata, Shakeeb has been hit by cyclone Amphan. Here is the view from his balcony.
Take his mind off the flood outside by sending him or the bibliography a flood of new items!
Enjoy! Use! Contribute!
Brian Boyd
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