Marie Bouchet and Matt Roth, President and Vice-President of the IVNS, have announced the results of the 2024 prize competitions. The judges evaluated many excellent contributions, and came up with the following results. Please check the next news item or the prize page for details on 2025 nominations.
Ellen Pifer Prize for Best Undergraduate Essay:
Madeleine Moino
“You’re NOT Everything I Imagined: The Distorting Power of Distance in Nabokov’s Works”
Madeleine Moino’s essay on distance in Nabokov’s work develops a sophisticated and nuanced argument in clear and elegant prose. Her essay offers an intriguing examination of the metaphorical and literal function of distance and proximity in Nabokov’s work and how it relates to Nabokov’s aesthetics and ethics. She argues that Nabokov’s male characters maintain a continuous distance from their objects of desire to sustain the fantasy which feeds this very desire. In particular, her analysis of the narrator’s “ocular relationship” with his childhood crush Polenka offers a new reading of this frequently overlooked relationship in Nabokov’s wider work. The judges were pleased to see that a new generation of Nabokov scholars continues to develop interesting and engaging critical work on Nabokov and gender.
Dieter E. Zimmer Prize for Best post-graduate Essay:
There was no winner chosen in this category for 2024.
Zoran Kuzmanovich Prize for Best PhD Dissertation:
Erik Eklund
“A Triptych of Bottomless Light: Repetition, Identity and Transcendence in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire”
Erik Eklund’s “A Triptych of Bottomless Light: Repetition, Identity and Transcendence in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire” is an original and valuable contribution to Nabokov scholarship. Its innovations entail not only the perspective of theology, but the elaboration of the textual performance of “non-identical repetition” as pervasive and significant.
Providing an insightful, specific, and well-supported reading of a novel that is much discussed but never exhausted, the thesis addresses the challenge of choice (e.g., the thematic primacy of Kinbote’s commentary or Shade’s poem) by discerning, throughout, parallel elements and patterns in addition to salient contrasts. Pale Fire does not require either-or thinking. The transcendent “otherworld” is everywhere within it.
The thesis is enriched by its focus on Pale Fire within the context of Nabokov’s biography and other writings, to the extent that there is much to learn not only about Pale Fire, but about the rest of Nabokov’s oeuvre and imagination. The close reading in Chapter Five of the novel’s “theological heart” is a tour de force, with its scrutiny of “two texts within Nabokov’s theological library: On the Trinity of Augustine and Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas.”
The thesis constitutes a model of scholarship that is thoroughly informed about the background of the critical conversation (regarding Nabokov as well as this novel), while illuminating Pale Fire by reading it as if for the first time, by giving sharp attention to Kinbote’s Christian faith (especially in Chapter Four) and to religious allusions, including the relevance of Old English Boethius. As an interdisciplinary work, it is also a model of scholarship “delineating a theological authorial presence” in the work of an author whose explicit statements on religion were more equivocal than transparent.
Erik Eklund’s thesis is ambitious and inspiring; reading it is a command to rise to the occasion.
Gennady Barabtarlo Prize for Best Essay:
Agnès Edel-Roy
Le vertige visionnaire de Lolita: #DitdeDolly
Agnès Edel-Roy’s “Le vertige visionnaire de Lolita: #DitdeDolly” offers a perspective which is both bold and overdue heralding Lolita as a visionary novel when it comes to literary tellings of sexual abuse. She diligently chronicles the sentimental and abusive misreading of the novel, from its inceptions to today. Moving beyond the false and simplistic view of a debate between puritans and libertines, Edel-Roy makes a compelling case for a sharp and detail-oriented reckoning of Lolita’s critical and popular reception. Reminding us of how the misreading of the novel occurred in spite of Nabokov’s own explanations and protest, as well as, most importantly, the text of the novel itself, she brings home a vision of Nabokov as exceptionally clear-minded and ahead of his time when discussing the vulnerable and constrained position of children living in an adult world. She pays homage to him as the author of a critical art, an “art of emancipation” which, though it was misunderstood as echoing or even promoting abuse at the time, can now, in the context of global feminist and anti-abuse movements, be seen as a visionary work of art exposing the reality of sexual abuse.
Jane Grayson Prize for Best First Book:
Tatyana Gershkovich
Art in Doubt (2022)
The premise of this subtle book is that Tolstoy and Nabokov, opposite in so many ways, share a troubled ground. Nabokov's "mature style is as baroque as Tolstoy's is ascetic", but "their rival styles... were reached by parallel flights from the same fear" [p.3]. Through close readings of a number of works by both authors, Professor Gershkovich takes us on an engaging journey into and out of doubt – although we are never out of it for long. "Disappointed desire" [p.21] haunts both authors. They deny "the possibility of certainty about another person's meaning while at the same time longing for it" [p.62]. "Each set off what might be called controlled explosions of suspicion: they stimulate our suspicion to subsequently cast doubt on its virtues and point up the possibility of a more trusting attitude to the author's words" [p.125]. As Professor Gershkovich deftly elucidates, the issue of doubt generates complex ramifications that extend ultimately to the creative process, and her discussion of its consequences in The Gift especially, for the novel’s actual and fictive authors, is both thought-provoking and persuasive, and offers one of the most compelling readings of the novel to date. Her chapter on Pale Fire ends with the elegant suggestion that "we begin by suspecting Kinbote but end by suspecting with him” [p.154].
Brian Boyd Prize for Best Second Book:
The Brian Boyd prize was off-cycle in 2024, and books with copyright dates in 2022, 2023, and 2024 are eligible for the 2025 prize.
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