Galina
Glushanok, Independent Researcher,
Nabokov and the
Chekhov Publishing House: New Materials from American
Archives
The Chekhov Publishing House,
which was founded in 1951 with the support of the Ford Foundation in
The Chekhov Publishing House
stayed in business for six years. During that time, they published some very
important works by Nabokov:
1952 – for the first time the
unabridged version of Dar as well as the Introduction to
Gogol's Peterburgskiye
povesti;
1954 – Drugiye Berega, Nabokov's autobiography in
Russian;
1956 – the collection of short stories, Vesna v
Fial'te.
Two American archives, The
Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture (Columbia
University, New York) and the Nabokov Archive (Berg Collection, New York Public
Library), hold in their collections the six-year-long correspondence between
Nabokov and the publishing house. The archives have 158 pieces of correspondence
that give us an idea of how Nabokov worked on preparing those books for
publication. Nabokov addressed his letters to four people at Chekhov Publishing
House: Director, Nikolas Wreden; Associate Director, Lilian Dillon Plante; and
two Editors-in-Chief: V. A. Alexandrova and T. G. Terentyeva. The letters focus
on book publication dates, galleys, copyrights, and
honorariums.
Nabokov's work on preparing texts
for publication seems most interesting. The cuts and changes that the publishing
house suggested were thoroughly discussed in the letters. Those work discussions
show a rare type of understanding between an author and a publishing house. When
making justified changes and correcting small mistakes in the text of Drugiye Berega, V. Alexandrova wrote to
Nabokov: "…I am asking you to trust me, my deeply respected Vladimir
Vladimirovich, in my sharing your opinion that the 'summit of art' can often be
reached by one's 'minimizing great things and maximizing details'; therefore I
have reduced to a minimum the list of words that I found
unusual…"
Not only is the history of Nabokov's writing and publications reflected in his correspondence with the publishing house: it also shows how fruitful the publishing program was in opposing the Communist dictatorship.
Sarah
Funke, Glenn Horowitz Bookseller,
Inc.,
"Mirages and
Nightmares”: The Narrative Lessons of Lolita from Novel to Script to
Screen
In this paper I will examine [ ... ] Using chapter eight of his memoir, entitled "Lantern Slides," as the definitional example of Nabokov's favored narrative device-the verbal translation of visual memories – I will show that the power of language to recreate images in the reader's mind dominates Lolita, as well. However, the evolution of Speak, Memory from Conclusive Evidence to Other shores, to the proposed Speak, Mnemosyne, to the final Speak, Memory illustrates a shift in the perceived narrative role of both the concrete images used as mnemonic devices and the mental images of memory. The first suggest that a story can be derived from visual evidence; the second, that one is alternately inspired and dictated by verbally recreated visual memories. The narrative authority similarly shifts with the transfer of visual memories – and visual devices which often stand in for memories, even if false or faded [...]
https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0209&L=NABOKV-L&E=quoted-printable&P=836895&B=------%3D_NextPart_001_0001_01C
Subject: Abstracts
of papers at the NABOKOV SYMPOSIUM (July 15-19, 2002) Saint
Petersburg
