Please note: this event will be held exclusively in Russian. All discussion and Q&A will be in Russian only, and no translation will be provided.

In the afterword to Lolita, Nabokov lamented his loss of the Russian language as a “private tragedy” and explained: “I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses – the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied of associations and traditions – which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.” Yet each of his English novels contain allusions to the “associations and traditions” of his Russian heritage – Russian words and phrases, Russian characters, references to Russian language, literature, history, art and more. Some of them are visible, but a good many are hidden and require a certain knowledge to be discerned and deciphered. In this lecture, Professor Dolinin will show how Nabokov managed to smuggle his Russian cultural baggage into his English writings, even those that do not have any Russian characters and settings.

Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializes in 19th and 20th-century Russian prose and poetry, English and American literature, and Russian-American literary ties. Dolinin is one of the most prominent Nabokov scholars internationally.  His book The Real Life of Vladimir Sirin, the Writer (St Petersburg, 2004; 2019) is widely regarded as the seminal book on Russian writings of Vladimir Nabokov. It was nominated for the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize in the category “the best book in humanities of 2004–2005” and was part of the final shortlist of five books. He  co-edited the five-volume collection of Nabokov’s Russian writings (1999–2000) and the two-volume collection of Nabokov’s writings in French translation, published in the famous series “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade” (Paris: Gallimard, 1999, 2010). In 2019 Dolinin published a comprehensive Commentary to  Nabokov's Novel "The Gift". He also is the author of over 250 scholarly papers on Pushkin, and his book Pushkin and England (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007) won the Efim Etkind Prize as “the best book in Russian studies” of 2006–2008.

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