Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokovians

Biographical and scholarly details about Nabokovian scholars, critics, translators, reviewers, researchers, and others.

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  • Adamovich, Georgy
  • Aisenberg, Joseph
  • Akikusa, Shun'ichiro (1979-) is Associate Professor of Nihon University. He obtained a doctorate from the University of Tokyo in 2009. His main focus is Nabokov’s translational work, including his specific self-translation and translation theory. Lately, he has also studied the circulation and publication of Nabokov’s works. He has translated some Nabokov’s works including his short stories and essays both in Russian and English into Japanese. Read more . . . 
  • Alexander, Victoria
  • Alexandrov, Vladimir
  • Alladaye, René
  • Alter, Robert (1935-  ), professor of Comparative Literature and Hebrew at University of California, Berkeley, is one of the most distinguished academic stylists and one of the deepest analysts of style to write about Nabokov, both in his own works and in relation to the traditions of self-conscious fiction. [BB] Read more . . . 
  • Amis, Martin
  • Andreev, Nikolay
  • Appel, Alfred, Jr (1934-2009). Nabokov's student in the 1950s, and, as a young teacher at Northwestern Nabokov's critic, annotator, interviewer, and friend in the 1960s and 1970s. The most inspiring analyst of Nabokov's self-consciousness and metafictionality, or as he called it, "involution," at a time when realism dominated American fiction.  [BB] Read more . . . 
  • Artemenko-Tolstoy, Natalia
  • Arzoo, Shakeeb
  • Averin, Boris
  • Aykhenvald, Yuly (1872-1928) was Nabokov's friend and mentor in Berlin in the 1920s. He was editor of Rul' 's literary department until his death, and author of the very popular Silhouettes of Russian Writers (1906, five editions through 1928). Read more . . .
  • Babikov, Andrei
  • Barabtarlo, Gennady Alexandrovich (Gene, 1949-2019), Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature at the University of Missouri, Columbia, was the foremost translator of Nabokov into Russian and a leading Nabokov scholar. Read more . .
  • Barbedette, Gilles
  • Baumann, Sabine
  • Belodubrovsky, Evgeny
  • Berberova, Nina
  • Bethea, David
  • Bitsilli, P. M. (1879-1953) was a historian and literary scholar, and a leading critical voice in the Russian emigration from 1920 on. He was among Nabokov's early admirers, and his reviews and articles on the works of V. Sirin show particular acuity and insight.
  • Blackwell, Stephen (1965- ), Professor of Russian, University of Tennessee,  is the author of Zina's Paradox: The Figured Reader in Nabokov's Gift and The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov and the Worlds of Science.  With Kurt Johnson, he co-edited Fine Lines: Vladimir Nabokov's Scientific Art. Read more. . .  
  • Bolt, Tom
  • Bouazza, Abdellah
  • Bouazza, Hafid
  • Bouchet, Marie (1976-) is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Toulouse, France. She wrote a book on Lolita (Paris: Atlande, 2009), along with some 40 articles on Nabokov, and co-edited The Five Senses in Nabokov's Works (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2020), and two issues of the Miranda online journal on Lolita . Read more...
  • Bozovic, Marijeta
  • Boyd, Brian (1952- ), University Distinguished Professor, English and Drama, Auckland, New Zealand, has worked on Nabokov since the early 1970s, as an annotator, archivist, bibliographer, biographer, critic, editor, and translator. Read more . . . 
  • Brown, Clarence
  • Buckingham, Jim (1950 – Idqué)
  • Burgess, Anthony
  • Calco, R. B.
  • Chupin, Yannicke
  • Collins, Billy
  • Connolly, Julian
  • Cotugno, Marianne
  • Couturier, Maurice published many scholarly essays on Nabokov both in French and in English, translated some of his works, like Lolita, and was chief editor of his novels in the Pléiade-Gallimard Edition. Also he undertook extensive research on the poetics of the modern novel and on censorship, and published a number of essays on the subject. His theory of the figure of the author which repudiates Foucault’s and Barthes’ theory of the death of the author isn’t a theory of reception but of the complex interaction between author and reader via the book industry and under the control of the law. It is based on an extended theory of communication partly inspired by the theories of the invisible college of Palo Alto and partly on psychoanalysis.
  • Davydov, Sergey
  • Delage-Toriel, Lara
  • Devos, Elena graduated from the Moscow State University (MGU) with an M.Sc. in Journalism (1999). She completed a PhD at the World Literature Institute (IMLI, branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences) with a dissertation on the theme of reality in Nabokov’s works (2005).Read more . . .
  • Diment, Galya
  • Dolinin, Alexander
  • Dragunoiu, Dana (1972-), Associate Professor of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her Ph.D. dissertation, titled “‘The universe embraced by consciousness’:  Vladimir Nabokov’s Philosophical Domain,” was completed in 2000. Read more . . . 
  • Durantaye, Leland de la  
  • Edel-Roy, Agnès
  • Edmunds, Jeffrey, creator and editor of Zembla, Read more. .
  • Efetov, Konstantin
  • Eklund, Erik (1991-), is a Research Scholar with the Northwestern University Research Initiative for the Study of Russian Philosophy and Religious Thought. His Ph.D. dissertation, titled "A Triptych of Bottomless Light: Repetition, Originality and Transcendence in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire," was completed under the supervision of Siggy Frank and Alison Milbank at the University of Nottingham in 2023. Read more . . .
  • Field, Andrew
  • Foster, John Burt
  • Frank, Siggy
  • Fraysse, Suzanne
  • Fujikawa, Yoshiyuki
  • Fukazawa, Akitoshi
  • Gershkovich, Tatyana
  • Giammittorio, Joseph
  • Goto, Atsushi
  • Garipova, Nailya
  • Grant, Paul
  • Grayson, Jane taught Russian literature at the University of St. Andrews and then in the School of Slavonic Studies and East European Studies in  University College, London. Her first book, Nabokov Translated, . . . Read more . . . 
  • Gwynn, R. S.
  • Hamrit, Jacqueline studied both in France (University of Montpellier and University of Lille) and the United States (Mount Holyoke College and The University of California, Davis). . . . Read more . . .
  • Hetenyi, Zsuzsa is author of the first monograph in Hungarian on Vladimir Nabokov, a synthesis spanning Nabokov’s twenty books in order to reconstruct the inner coherence of his oeuvre (Nabokov regényösvényein, [On the paths of Nabokov’s novels], Budapest: Kalligram, 2015. 928 pp.). She translated from English to Hungarian Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky, from Russian (among others) I. Babel, M. Bulgakov, Chekhov, V. Grossman, D. Kharms, L. Lunts, V. Sorokin, V. Voinovich, E. Zamyatin, and an anthology of Russian-Jewish prose (17 authors from Osip Rabinovich to Vladimir Jabotinsky).  
  • Hitchens, Christopher
  • Hughes, Robert P. 
  • Hyde, G. M.
  • Ibrahim, Mo
  • Isahaya, Yuichi
  • Ivanov, Georgy
  • Johnson, Donald (Don) Barton  (1937-2020) was the leading American Nabokovian of his day, from the late in the 1970s to late in the 2000s.  Read more . . . 
  • Johnson, Kurt
  • Juliar, Michael
  • Kaizawa, Hajime
  • Karlinsky, Simon
  • Kato, Mitsuya
  • Karpukhin, Sergey
  • Karshan, Thomas, author of Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play, editor of Nabokov's Collected Poems, and co-translator, with Anastasia Tolstoy, of The Tragedy of Mister Morn, along with various other articles on Nabokov. President of the IVNS (2018-19).
  • Kawabata, Kaori
  • Khodasevich, Vladislav
  • Kokinova, Katherina
  • Konishi, Masataka
  • Księżopolska, Irena
  • Kunin, Carolyn
  • Kuzmanovich, Zoran edits Nabokov Studies, teaches at Davidson College, and reconstructs the originals of historically significant but now reformulated perfumes.
  • Lafont, Anne-Marie is a high-school certified teacher (professeur certifié) of French and modern French literature, as well as a teacher trainer in the EIP academic unit (for high-potential pupils) in Aix-Marseille. She has spent much of her life abroad (13 years in Russia), and continues her work as an independent researcher on the Russian work of Vladimir Nabokov, especially his novels. She strives to make the author’s work better known to students through positive pedagogy.
  • Leving, Yuri is University Research Professor in the Department of Russian Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada, the founding editor of the Nabokov Online Journal (since 2007), and the author of eight books wholly or partly on Nabokov, and many articles. Read more . . . 
  • Levinson, André
  • Liu, Jialin
  • Loison-Charles, Julie is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Lille, France, and the Vice-President of the French Vladimir Nabokov Society. She has published a monograph on Nabokov’s use of foreign words (Vladimir Nabokov, ou l’écriture du multilinguisme: mots étrangers et jeux de mots, Nanterre: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2016) as well as many articles on Nabokov’s multilingualism and his practice of translation. She organized several conferences on Nabokov, and the last one was a transatlantic symposium which took place first at the University of Lille and then at the University of North Carolina, USA.
  • Lubin, Peter
  • Maar, Michael
  • Malikova, Maria
  • Manolescu, Monica
  • Martinez, Juan
  • Mason, Bobbie Ann
  • Matoba, Izumi
  • Medlock, Maya Minao
  • Mello de Souza, Jansy
  • Meyer, Priscilla (1942- ) is Professor Emerita of Russian at Wesleyan University. Her book, Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, will be published by Northwestern University Press in August 2018. Read more . . . 
  • Millhauser, Steven
  • Miura, Shoko (1946- ) is Professor Emerita of English at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology. She was president of the Nabokov Society of Japan (2010-11) and is a member of the Kyoto Reading Circle on the KRC Annotations to Ada.
  • Mori, Kumi
  • Moynahan, Julian
  • Nabokov, Dmitri (1934-2012), the only child and heir of Vladimir and Véra Nabokov, opera basso profundo, racing car driver, Ferrari collector, playboy, and mountain climber, was the major translator and editor of his father’s work and defender of his reputation. Read more . . . 
  • Nafisi, Azar
  • Naiman, Eric
  • Nakata, Akiko is Professor of English at Nanzan University. Read more. .
  • Nicol, Charles
  • Norman, Will
  • Numano, Mitsuyoshi
  • Parker, Luke
  • Parker, Stephen Jan (1939-2016), a student of VN's at Cornell, and one of the first to write a PhD on VN, set up the Vladimir Nabokov Society and its organ, Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter, later the Nabokovian, and with George Gibian organized the first Nabokov conference, at Cornell in 1983. Read more . . . 
  • Pessl, Marisha
  • Picon, Francisco
  • Pifer, Ellen (1942- ) is Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Delaware. She wrote her PhD dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, on Nabokov under leading early Nabokovians Simon Karlinsky and Robert Alter. Revised and published as Nabokov and the Novel Read more . . .
  • Ponomareva, Tatyana
  • Proffer, Carl
  • Proffer, Ellendea
  • Quin, John. Scottish medical doctor, now retired, who has published on Nabokov's cardiology and neuroscience (search the Nabokovian notes).
  • Rakhimova-Sommers, Elena
  • Rivers, J. E.
  • Rodgers, Michael is Honorary Associate and Associate Lecturer in English Literature at The Open University, UK. He is the author of Nabokov and Nietzsche: Problems and Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2018) and co-editor, with Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, of Nabokov and the Question of Morality: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction (Palgrave, 2016). He was the sole organiser of the ‘Nabokov and Morality Symposium’ at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow in 2011.
  • Ronen, Omry
  • Roth, Matthew has been an active member of the IVNS since 2006. His scholarly work, mainly focused on Pale Fire, includes the first major study of the Pale Fire manuscript and numerous other articles, notes, and annotations. He serves as the Associate Editor for Reviews for the Nabokov Online Journal. He is also the author of one book of poetry (Bird Silence, 2009) and teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Messiah University, in Grantham, Pennsylvania.
  • Roth, Phyllis
  • Sagae, Mitsunori
  • Scheiner, Corinne
  • Schiff, Stacey
  • Schneider, Graziela
  • Schuman, Samuel
  • Shapiro, Gavriel (1945- ), Professor of Comparative and Russian Literature at Cornell University, has written, inter alia, three books on Nabokov, including The Sublime Artist’s Studio: Nabokov and Painting (2009), and edited Nabokov at Cornell (2003), based on the centenary conference he organized there in 1998. Read more . . . 
  • Shrayer, Maxim
  • Shvabrin, Stanislav teaches Russian language and literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Read more . . . 
  • Sklyarenko, Alexey
  • Skonechnaya, Olga
  • Smith, Zadie
  • Spira, Ivo
  • Stark, Vadim
  • Stegner, Page
  • Steiner, George
  • Stuart, Dabney
  • Struve, Gleb
  • Stuart, Dabney
  • Sugimoto, Kazunao
  • Suzuki, Akira
  • Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth (Beth)
  • Tammi, Pekka
  • Tarvi, Ljuba
  • Toker, Leona is Professor Emerita in English Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Read more. .
  • Tolstoy, Anastasia
  • Tolstoy, Ivan
  • Updike, John
  • Vernon, David is a literary academic and music writer. Read more. .
  • Voronina, Olga
  • Vries, Gerard de trained and has been employed as an economist; Read more. .
  • Wakashima, Tadashi (1952- ), is Professor Emeritus of English (Kyoto University), the current president of the Nabokov Society of Japan, and chair of the Kyoto Reading Circle. He is a chess problem composer and International Master in solving chess problems. Read more . . . 
  • Weidle, Vladimir
  • Wen Daowei
  • Wetzsteon, Ross
  • White, Edmund
  • Wilson, Edmund
  • Wiśniewski, Mikołaj
  • Wood, Michael
  • Wu Juan
  • Wyllie, Barbara
  • Zimmer, Dieter E. (1934-2020), the leading German Nabokovian, working on Nabokov since 1959, as annotator, bibliographer, editor, interviewer, translator, and the expert literary scholar on Nabokov's butterflies, his time in Germany, and many other aspects of Nabokovian realia, while also being a major essayist and journalist on language, science, and technology. [SB, BB] Read more . . . 
  • Zunshine, Lisa