Vinitsky, Ilya. Unearthing LOL: The Imaginary Adventures of a Slavicist in Leningrad. 2021

Ilya Vinitsky’s (Princeton University) article, “Unearthing LOL: The Imaginary Adventures of a Slavicist in Leningrad,” re-discovers and deciphers an unusual Nabokovian mystification (a series of “fictional essays”), created by the fake writer Larry Gregg as a tribute to VN. This playful literary phantasmagoria, informed by the author’s conversations with Soviet non-conformist intellectuals in Leningrad in the late 1960s, provides a glimpse into their spiritual (in both meanings of the word) culture. It also presents a mock commentary on American debates concerning Nabokov’s Commentary to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin as “an encyclopedia of Russian life.”