{"id":8137,"date":"2018-10-03T12:02:07","date_gmt":"2018-10-03T16:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/?p=8137"},"modified":"2018-10-03T17:43:52","modified_gmt":"2018-10-03T21:43:52","slug":"professor-nabokov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/2018\/10\/03\/professor-nabokov\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor Nabokov"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Title<\/a> Among recent gifts to Harvard Library, the papers and books of the Nabokov family\u2014Vladimir Nabokov, his wife V\u00e9ra, and his son Dmitri\u2014take pride of place. Jointly stewarded by Houghton Library and the Museum of Comparative Zoology (where Nabokov was curator of lepidoptery), the collection was given to Harvard University by the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation. \u00a0While most Nabokov papers reside at the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, these materials were retained by Dmitri until his death in 2012. The papers are now being cataloged and will be available for research in 2019. In this post, we\u2019ll focus on one of the richly annotated books that came with the collection.<\/p>\n

While the collection includes numerous books by and about Vladimir Nabokov, annotated with corrections, questions, disputations, and other interferences, this book served a more workaday purpose: it is a Russian grammar, printed in 1942 and evidently used in teaching the subject. In the years during and following World War II, Nabokov taught Russian grammar and literature as a lecturer at Wellesley College. He was an established author in his homeland then, but a new arrival and relative unknown in the United States, and it would be another decade before Lolita<\/em> would propel him both to fame and to infamy. In 1977, the New Yorker<\/em> published an account of Nabokov\u2019s Russian literature course from a student\u2019s perspective, available
\nhere<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Title<\/p>\n

The grammar text is densely annotated throughout, as Nabokov organized lessons and emphasized exercises; he also made corrections to the text in both Russian and English. Nabokov introduced the study of Russian language and literature to Wellesley, as wartime alliance with the U.S.S.R. spurred academic interest in the subject; this textbook is evidence of his process as he worked to bring his first language across to a new culture and a new generation.\u00a0For example, a flyleaf in the rear of the book illustrates the complexity of Russian verbs \u2014a difficulty for his students which Nabokov likely anticipated. Here Nabokov has written out twelve different ways of saying, \u201cI read\u201d (\u042f \u0447\u0438\u0442\u0430\u044e) and “I write” (\u042f \u043f\u0438\u0448\u0443) in the past tense.<\/p>\n

\"Nabokov<\/p>\n

Turning toward the volume\u2019s endpapers, we find evidence of Nabokov\u2019s multifarious intellect: blank leaves at the front and back are covered with observations on butterflies from Nabokov the lepidopterist. (For more on his six-year tenure at MCZ, see this post<\/a> from the Ernst Mayr Library\u2019s blog.) To add another layer, the books and papers in this collection also reflect Nabokov\u2019s interest in, and authorship of, chess problems. Collectively, they offer new lenses through which to see this eminent literary family.<\/p>\n

\"Nabokov<\/p>\n

The books annotated by Vladimir Nabokov are available for research at Houghton Library, and can be found in HOLLIS<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Thanks to bibliographic assistant\u00a0Ryan Wheeler\u00a0for contributing this post.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Among recent gifts to Harvard Library, the papers and books of the Nabokov family\u2014Vladimir Nabokov, his wife V\u00e9ra, and his son Dmitri\u2014take pride of place. Jointly stewarded by Houghton Library and the Museum of Comparative Zoology (where Nabokov was curator of lepidoptery), the collection was given to Harvard University by the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1761,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5TUly-27f","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1761"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8137"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8161,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8137\/revisions\/8161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}