Dolinin, Alexander. The Faults and Failures of Dilettantism: On the New Publications of Nabokov’s Drafts. 2015

Alexander Dolinin’s (University of Wisconsin-Madison) article, “The Faults and Failures of Dilettantism: On the New Publications of Nabokov’s Drafts,” surveys some latest archival publications of Nabokov’s correspondence and unpublished prose. Professor Dolinin pinpoints and discusses serious errors in textology and commentary, focusing on Andrei Babikov’s publication of the text of the so-called “Pink Notebook” – the unfinished continuation of Nabokov’s last novel, The Gift. He demonstrates numerous flaws in the transcription of the manuscript as well as in annotations and disproves Babikov’s ungrounded hypothesis that the drafts were written in 1941 in USA.