A Moscow publishing house, Deich, issued a Russian Lolita in 2008 in a large format with a leather spine in a leather box, and with black-and-white illustrations, limited to 99 numbered copies, none hors commerce, ISBN 978-5-98691-042-0. Price: €1700. At the current exchange rate that’s more than $2250.
Archive for March, 2009
The Dearest Lolita
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009Tooling Along Towards Laura
Sunday, March 29th, 2009The publication of The Original of Laura: (Dying Is Fun) is moving ahead. It’s listed on the Random House/Knopf website for release in November. You can pre-order it from amazon.com at $23.10 (discounted from $35.00) for November 3rd delivery (ISBN: 0-307-27189-7/978-0-307-27189-1). If you’re in Britain, amazon.co.uk is asking £22.22 for the same edition.
There is no dust jacket image yet. The Knopf blurb describes the 288-page package:
At last: Vladimir Nabokov’s final and unfinished novel, in print—thirty years after his death, years in which the fate of The Original of Laura was in constant and closely watched question.
When Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of The Original of Laura. But Nabokov’s wife, Vera, couldn’t bear to destroy her husband’s last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son. Dmitri Nabokov, now seventy-four— the Russian novelist’s only surviving heir, and translator of many of his books—has struggled for decades with the decision of whether to honor his father’s wish or preserve for posterity the last piece of writing of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His decision finally to allow publication will be passionately welcomed by both scholars and general readers. And the ingenious format of the book (which includes removable facsimiles of the index cards) will make an even more extraordinary occasion of this publishing event.
In its fragmented narrative—dark yet playful, preoccupied with mortality—we are given one last experience of a writer’s unparalleled creativity, a glimpse of his last days, and a body of work finding its apotheosis.
The book will include a short introduction by Dmitri Nabokov. In addition, Knopf is issuing an “eBook” version (ISBN: 0-307-27325-3/978-0-307-27325-3) at the same price to be released also in November. There’s no mention of the eBook on amazon.com.
I have no information on foreign language rights. I wonder if The New Yorker is going to take on serial rights. The Nabokovian, in a real sense, already has taken the first serial rights (see No. 42/Spring 1999, pp. 34 (#2) & 37 (#5)).
A voice hums in my head: Laura is a wild and florid set of fragments. And then I hear: The book, he answered, is a novel too—at least, after a fashion.
Lolita in Ukrainian (2)
Saturday, March 28th, 2009Again with help from Andrey Nickolayenko and this time from Tatiana Ponomareva, director of the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, I’ve received further information about the Ukrainian Lolita. It was translated from the Russian by Peter Taraschuk and published in Kharkov by Folio in 2008 in a run of 1250 copies. It may not be an authorized edition. More is at gazeta.ua.
VN in Georgian (2)
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009With the kind and quick help of Andrey Nickolayenko and Tamriko Kvachadze, I’ve learned a bit more about my Georgian copy of Lolita (see my 18 March posting). It was translated from the Russian by Tamar Lomidze and published by Logos in Tbilisi, Georgia in 2002. It includes the three addenda that should be part of all Russian editions and translations from the Russian: VN’s original English afterword, his Russian postscript, and his Russian list of foreign terminology in the novel.
Lolita in Ukrainian
Saturday, March 21st, 2009A friend in Moscow tells me a Lolita in Ukrainian was published in 2008. Does anyone have details? In fact, has any other VN work been translated and published into Ukrainian? I know of none.
DN Sighting
Friday, March 20th, 2009For those interested, Dmitri Nabokov has contributed an afterword to Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia (MIT Press). VN’s mother and he himself had synesthesia, a cross-sensory perception in which among other possible combinations, one sees numbers or sounds as colored. Dmitri too is a synesthete and writes about the lineage and experiences of the gift. Details are on amazon.com.
Item Types in the New Bibliography
Thursday, March 19th, 2009My 1986 Nabokov bibliography had 12 item types:
| A | separate publication |
| AA | scientific offprint |
| B | contribution |
| C | periodical appearance |
| D | translation |
| E | prepublication |
| F | braille, recording for the blind |
| G | adaptation |
| H | interview, remark |
| I | ephemera, miscellanea |
| J | piracy |
| K | criticism, biography, bibliography |
The A-, B-, C-, and D-types are standard categories in descriptive bibliographies. I created the other categories out of need, to try to capture the rich biota that has sprung up around his works and publications. By the way, the K category is not for items containing VN works but a catch-all for books “about” Nabokov.
In my work on the new bibliography, I’ve found that I need to create two new item types to account for the large number of compilations of VN’s work that were beginning to proliferate even before he died. They are compilations of works in the languages in which VN originally wrote them and compilations of works that others translated into various languages. I call the compilations L-items and the compilations of translations M-items.
Five Novels, Collins, 1979
I tried to account for compilations in my original bibliography by listing them under the A- or D- items that seemed most appropriate. So, Five Novels, the British compilation issued by Collins in 1979, appeared in my bibliography under the A-item of its first work, Lolita. But what about the other four works, The Gift, Invitation to a Beheading, King Queen Knave, and Glory? If you go to A17 where all of the original and translated (by VN) versions of Дар/The Gift appear, there is no mention of the Five Novels appearance. At that time, I didn’t want to pepper a compilation multiple times throughout the A-item descriptions from which the compilations’ works are derived. And I feel the same way now.
And that goes for compilations of translations. In 1966 Rowohlt published Frühling in Fialta: Dreiundswanzig Erzählungen, Dieter E. Zimmer’s (Dieter, thanks for all you’ve done) compilation of 13 translated stories from the original collections of, to use the English translations, The Eye (A12), Spring in Fialta (A29), and Nabokov’s Dozen (A32).
So, I’ve created the two new item types. Five Novels will appear in the revised bibliography as L3 because it is chronologically the third VN compilation. And Frühling in Fialta will appear as M2, the chronologically second translation compilation. And, you may ask, why are they only the third and the second compilations of their types? What came before them?
- Poesie, Il Saggiatore, 1962
In 1962, Il Saggiatore of Milan published Poesie, a collection of translations of 16 of VN’s Russian poems and 14 of his English ones. It is a tight little volume, 18.2 X 11.5 cm, 136 pages, with a black and teal graphic cover. All copies I’ve examined had no dust wrappers. It sold for “Lire cinquecento”. Inside, the 30 poems are translated into Italian on pages facing their original Russian and English texts. So here we have two things: First, a compilation, the first new compilation of VN poems, a compilation not organized by VN (like Стихи (1916), Гроздь, Стихотворения 1929-1951, Poems, and others) but by someone else. And second, we have a translated compilation. That means we have L1 and M1. (No reason a publication can’t be associated with more than one item type.)
But there is one more interesting thing about this collection. The 31st work (counting the originals and the translations, or the 16th Russian poem) had never appeared in a book before. It is the poem “Какое сделал я дурное дело [What is the evil deed I have committed]”. What we have here then is an A-item. Chronologically speaking, it should be A35. Of course, that means that I have to renumber all A-items from Pale Fire, the current A35 on up. The sequence of A-items in the new edition will not fully match the sequence in the old edition.
To Summarize
The new bibliography’s table of item types:
| A | separate publication |
| AA | scientific offprint |
| B | contribution |
| C | periodical appearance |
| D | translation |
| E | prepublication |
| F | braille, recording for the blind |
| G | adaptation |
| H | interview, remark |
| I | ephemera, miscellanea |
| J | piracy |
| K | criticism, biography, bibliography |
| L | compilation |
| M | compilation of translations |
The new items described so far:
- Poezie, Il Saggiatore, 1962, in Italian with Russian and English, will be A35, L1, and M1.
- Nabokov’s Congeries will become A40 (from A39, after the insertion of Poesie into the A-item sequence) and L2.
- Five Novels will be L3.
- Frühling in Fialta will be M2.
As I continue to hack new paths through the VN forest of publications, I’ll pass on the discoveries and set out my signposts.
VN in Georgian
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
Lolita, Georgian, 2002
The modern Georgian literary language 33-character alphabet is known as “mxedruli”. I have a copy of Lolita translated into the language. It appears that it is copyrighted 2002 and the ISBN is 99928-924-1-2. I can figure nothing out about it beyond that. Does anyone know of other translations of VN into Georgian? Does anyone know Georgian so that I can send him/her a scan of the front matter for translation into English?
VVN’s V&V
Monday, March 16th, 2009Have you gotten a hold of Verses and Versions yet? Do. It’s a tour and a tour-de-force, Nabokov-style. It’s an enriching stroll through another one of those literary gardens that Nabokov was always taking us on: Eugene Onegin, The Song of Igor’s Campaign, A Hero of Our Time, the lectures. I often feel that, right up there with his sense of form and his use of language was his intense desire to share with us what he loved so much, literature—and in particular, Russian literature. He was a teacher. And isn’t every great artist?
Verses and Versions, Harcourt, 2008
Excuse me. The point of this posting isn’t to wax eloquent over VN’s writing but to let you know a few things about V&V, bibliographically speaking. By my count, it contains 172 Nabokov works (with five more works embedded inside of those 172) going back to 1929: mostly translations—some of whole works, many of parts of works—but also essays, notes, poems, and criticism. A great number of the pieces are extractions from the original and the revised editions of Eugene Onegin. The notes at the back are extremely useful for tracking down the origins of the works.
The book is fully 480 pages long. It is very attractively designed with a recurring graphic on the dust jacket, facing the title-page, on section pages, and on a few other pages. I think that it is called an arabesque. But I’m not sure. Does anyone know?
O Digital VN, Where Art Thou?
Sunday, March 15th, 2009Let’s begin by talking about not-quite-books.
I got a call from a friend last week who asked why, out of 240,000 books available on Amazon’s Kindle digital reader, not one book of Nabokov’s can be found. He pointed out that he can buy a digital version of all of Dickens’s works for only $4.95. So, why not even one of Nabokov’s at any price?
All I could tell him was that first of all, Dickens is in the public domain and Nabokov isn’t. And second of all, as far as I know, Dmitri Nabokov, in the process of controlling the rights to all of his father’s works, has not licensed any of them for digital publication. Will he change his mind? Maybe, if the price is right. Apparently it’s also not quite right either for John Grishem or J.K. Rowling. In the meantime, without much difficulty, you can find many of Nabokov’s works in text files (though they are unauthorized—the equivalent of piracies—and probably full of typos) across the internet.