Talking Nabokov at the Smithsonian this Thursday, June 6
For those of you living in and around the nation’s capital–seats are still available for my talk at the Smithsonian Associates program this Thursday (June 6), starting at 6:45 pm in Washington, DC. I’ll be looking at both Lolita and Pale Fire in the context of Nabokov’s family, as well as World War II and concentration camp history. See images […]
Nabokov, Feynman, and the names of trees
What do Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist, and Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, have in common? For one, synesthesia—a blending of sensory input experienced by four percent of the population. Letters for Nabokov came paired with specific colors, and Feynman similarly reported seeing “light tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s flying around” in […]
The New York Review of Books looks at The Secret History
Nabokov had a complicated relationship with his critics, not least Edmund Wilson, whose 1965 review of Eugene Onegin in The New York Review of Books put a stake through the heart of their friendship. Here’s Wilson’s opening line: This production, though in certain ways valuable, is something of a disappointment; and the reviewer, though a […]
Declassified documents and public records in The Secret History
What’s so secret about The Secret History? The most important history in the book is information that was once public knowledge but which has fallen out of public memory–Nabokov’s secret history as our forgotten past. But there is also some actual secret history in there: classified documents and public records that shed light on Nabokov’s life […]
Meet Carl Junghans: informer, propagandist, and… literary inspiration for Nabokov?
Vladimir Nabokov threw a Molotov cocktail into twentieth-century literature with Lolita. Alexander Solzhenitsyn survived Russian forced-labor camps and brought the word gulag into the global lexicon. Plenty of drama involving both of them appears in The Secret History, but as characters in the book they nonetheless faced competition from a lesser-known, scenery-chewing German named Carl […]
Was Véra Nabokov’s sister a spy?
When the Nabokovs came to America in 1940, they sailed through immigration, pausing only to struggle with a locked trunk that needed to be inspected by customs. But arrival in a new country was less simple for thousands of other refugees fleeing Europe during World War II, including Véra Nabokov’s younger sister Sonia. Making her […]
