http://www.svoboda.org/archive/ru_bz_otb_eh/latest/896/211.html

 

For those who understand Russian (probably more people than Hungarian!!), Radio Svoboda has a long interview by Ivan Tolstoy with Zsuzsa Hetényi, the author of a monumental

Nabokov regényösvényein [On the paths of Nabokov's novels], Budapest, Kalligram, 2015, 985 pp

 

 

 

See:   http://www.kalligram.com/?cl=kniha&iid=1470&PHPSESSID=0915af563c56a0b892905864a0

The volume, after some introductory chapters (childhood  and family background shown inside of an analysis of Speak, memory!; Russian Berlin; Nabokov's turn to prose and novel; early translations; beginnings of Nabokov's special prose-language in his Berlin-short stories) discusses all 18 novels and the last unfinished one. Each novel is discussed in a chapter, by tracking and discovering each novel’s relation to the lifework as a whole. The book follows  the trajectory of Nabokov’s novels for demonstrating the manner in which they are interrelated, built upon one another by the complex pattern dominated by invariants, oft-recurring agglutinative, governing devices and techniques. The discussion of the coherence of the lifework subjected to scrutiny is accomplished through a systematic analysis of approximately 130 polygenic and invariant patterns, some of which were partially revealed in the wide critical literature published earlier. The author offers several new definitions and concepts, among them those about the interconnectedness of the Russian and the English sequence of novels. The book, being the first one on Nabokov in Hungarian, also functions as a handbook, with Russian-English (and Hungarian) tables and lists, bibliographies, and a threefold index (names, VN-titles, subjects).