Dear List,

No one has responded to the June 4 post (a query sent to Juan Martinez, which he 
forwarded to the List) about rescuing the house in Palo Alto, CA, where Nabokov 
and his family spent the summer of 1941 while he taught at Stanford University.  
Apparently, the house was recently sold to new owners who plan to tear it down.

Is anyone interested in volunteering to try to help save this house?  It would 
probably require asking for support from various institutions -- the Nabokov 
Society, the Stanford University English Department, any local neighborhood 
associations or historic preservation societies in California, and so forth -- 
and seeking press coverage.  Does anyone have any other ideas on how to proceed?  


In VNAY, Brian Boyd describes the house as follows: "The Nabokov rented a neat 
little house, a trim Riviera villa, at 230 Sequoia Avenue, just across El Camino 
Real from the Stanford campus: a sequoia in their own front garden, but no phone 
and no car" (p. 29).  [See attached photos.]  The house is especially 
significant because it was the first of many houses that the Nabokovs rented in 
America after arriving in that country in 1940  -- they never owned a home -- 
and because Nabokov lived there at the beginning of his teaching career in the 
United States.  Dmitri Nabokov recently remarked that "among my childhood 
memories of America, this house and the life I led there figure prominently and 
fill me with affection.  My father's particular happiness at that time was, I 
think, contagious."

Sincerely,


Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Co-Editor, NABOKV-L

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