Julian W. Connolly

Nature's Reality or Humbert's "Fancy"?: Scenes of Reunion and Murder in Lolita

This essay explores the supposition first put forth by Elizabeth Bruss that two of the most important scenes in the novel—Humberts reunion with Dolores Haze (now Dolly Schiller) and his execution of Clare Quilty—are imaginative fabrications by Humbert the narrator.1 The evidence for this hypothesis rests in a careful consideration of calendric clues implanted by Nabokov in his text. These include Humberts statements that he received a letter from Dolly Schiller on September 22 (1952), and that he has worked on the manuscript of Lolita for fifty-six days, as well as a statement by the author of the Foreword, John Ray, Jr., that Humbert died on November 16, 1952.2 If Humbert is accurate in stating that he had been working on his manuscript for fifty-six days, then he began the manuscript on the day he received Dollys letter and he concluded it on the day he died. He could not have traveled to Coalmont, seen Dolly, and ventured on to kill Quilty as he indicates.3

Nabokov's "Invitation to a Beheading": A Critical Companion

In an unnamed dream country, Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for gnostical turpitude, an imaginary crime that defies definition. After spending his last days in jail, he simply wills his executioners out of existence.

The Lolita phenomenon from Paris to Tehran

The history of Lolita , Nabokovs third novel in English, is nearly as bizarre as the story related in its pages. The narrator, Humbert Humbert, is a middle-aged European whose benighted passion for a twelve-year-old American girl drives him to make her his mistress. Years before the manuscript was rejected by a series of American publishers, Lolita s author nearly destroyed it himself. On a summers day in 1950, riddled with doubts about the novel, Nabokov was on his way to the garden incinerator to burn its initial chapters when his wife, Vera, persuaded him to reconsider. As the novelist explained six years later, in his afterword to Lolita s belated American edition, “I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life” ( Lo , 312 [ “On a Book Entitled Lolita ”]). Nabokov gradually resumed work on the novel, which he completed in the spring of 1954. After five different American publishers found the subject too hot to handle, Lolita was brought out in Paris by the Olympia Press, best known for the frank sexual content of its publications. Rescued from oblivion by the prominent British novelist, Graham Greene, who praised Lolita s artistic merits in the pages of the London Sunday Times , the novel quickly became the focus of a legal and literary controversy. Despite its championship by American writers and critics, Lolita was not published in the USA until 1958; it quickly became an international bestseller.

Nabokov and modernism

Modernism - or as Peter Nicholls has emphasized, “modernisms” - was a tangled web of international but mainly Western movements of literary innovation in the early twentieth century, especially from 1900 to 1930. Nabokov himself rarely used the term, which only came to dominate English-language criticism around 1960; and any account of his affinities with modernist attitudes in literature must begin by allowing for his resistance to all such historical labels. Sweeping generalizations about periods and styles were, after all, a stock-in-trade of Soviet literary policy as it promoted “socialist realism” from the 1930s onward. This doctrine routinely led to attacks on Nabokovs “top favorite” novelists from abroad (notably Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, and Proust), and also resulted in the official exclusion of his own writings from Russia until Gorbachev and the glasnost of the 1980s. Even worse, these cultural policies blocked the careers and ruined the lives of many twentieth-century Russian writers, especially (for Nabokov) Osip Mandelshtam (1891-1938). This gifted poet graduated from the same progressive school in St. Petersburg that Nabokov later attended, and his death in a Siberian labor camp warned of the novelists own probable fate had he not left for the West in 1919. Both Nabokovs intense dislike for literary “-isms” and the Soviet background for this hostility burst forth in one of his “strong opinions” of the 1960s, in which he expressed “helpless shame” at the thought of Mandelshtam having to write “under the accursed rule of those beasts” ( SO , 58).

Nabokov and Dostoevsky: Good Writer, Bad Reader?

Connolly examines Nabokov’s published university lectures on the work of Dostoevsky to determine the accuracy of his claims about the artistic qualities of Dostoevsky’s fiction. Nabokov was often severe in his estimation of Dostoevsky’s artistic merit. Yet while Nabokov repeatedly emphasized the primacy of “art” over ideas, or esthetics over moral content, Connolly shows how his own lectures do not always exemplify this ideal. That is, Nabokov’s evaluation of Dostoevsky’s works seems concerned more with ethical, ideological, and religious issues than with what might be called esthetic criteria (such as style, language, or structure). “Nabokov and Dostoevsky: Good Writer, Bad Reader?” argues that if readers look at Dostoevsky’s work using Nabokov’s own preferred criteria, they will find that Dostoevsky’s works often meet those very criteria.

Black and White and Dead All Over: Color Imagery in Nabokov's Prose

Vladimir Nabokov possessed an acute sensitivity to gradations of color, and he rebuffed attempts to attach broad symbolic meanings to specific colors in his work. Yet although Nabokovs work displays an impressive range of color images, one color combination perhaps carried a special resonance in his fiction. In several works the combination of black and white appears conspicuously associated with the theme of death. The essay focuses on the use of black and white in Laughter in the Dark and Lolita in an attempt to explore and explain the thematic association.

Nabokov's Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other

Dedication Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The quest of the other 2. Altering the themes of life 3. The evil differentiation of shadows 4. A fondness for the mask 5. Dimming the bliss of Narcissus 6. The struggle for autonomy 7. The transforming rays of creative consciousness Notes Abbreviation Bibliography of works cited.

Desire and Renunciation: Buddhist Elements in the Prose of Ivan Bunin

AbstractIvan Bounine etait un ecrivain profondement conscient de la fugacite de la vie et de ses joies ineffables. Les enseignements bouddhistes lui fournirent une interpretation de l’existence humaine qui dit que la souffrance de l’homme nait de son attachement a la vie. Selon la pensee bouddhiste, toute souffrance est consequence de desir, non seulement du desir des plaisirs terrestres mais, en fin de cause, du desir de vivre lui-meme. Bounine examina cette conception apres 1910 a travers une serie de nouvelles, dont la premiere, “Brat’ia,” date de 1914. Dans ces ecrits Bounine montre la vanite des desirs humains et revele la paix qu’on peut atteindre en renoncant a ces desirs.Au cours des annees qui suivirent, Bounine assimila peu a peu certains elements de la pensee bouddhiste et les integra a sa vue personnelle du monde. En particulier, il mit a nu la contradiction de l’homme qui tient a la vie, qui en poursuit les plaisirs, et qui sait, cependant, combien cette poursuite, tout comme la vie elle-meme...