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Speakers): Stanislav Shvabrin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Worship” is one of the first words that comes to mind when we contemplate Nabokov’s attitude toward Pushkin, especially in connection with the compositions produced during his “Russian” years. Eastern Europe has a particularly strong tradition of bardolatry – it is here, after all, where the “wieszczowie” (poets) of various origins and sizes are celebrated as if the news of Romanticism’s expiration date has not reached their devotees. Yet Nabokov’s personal brand of life-long active engagement with Pushkin sets a new standard of literary devotion, intensity, and, for want of a better word, fecundity. Before we give way to the understandable desire to move past these tired ecclesiastical tropes, however, let us dwell on what was at stake for Nabokov as he realized the futility of his early paeans to Pushkin and began his journey toward the remarkably uninhibited, radiantly humorous, and outwardly paradoxical glorification of Pushkin’s unenviable lot in The Gift. Reverent it was not, and no other document sheds more light on this critically important juncture of Nabokov’s career in letters than his unpublished Pushkin talk of 1931. This claim, which lies at the center of this paper, is a strong one to be sure, but I insist that it merits consideration as a singularly eloquent formulation of Nabokov’s perspective on the poet’s place in his own life, even as it effectively amounted to his declaration of artistic independence from Russia’s most enduring myth.

STANISLAV SHVABRIN’s research focuses on poetics, comparative literary studies, translation studies, and diaspora studies. In addition to his archival research, scholarly and editorial work on Vladimir Nabokov (Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry Selected and Translated by Vladimir Nabokov, 2008, and The Original of Laura, 2009), Shvabrin has written on Georgy Ivanov and Marina Tsvetaeva and published scholarly essays and archival materials in such periodical outlets as Comparative Literature, Russian Literature and Slavic and East European Journal, as well as Novyi zhurnal and Zvezda. 2015 marks a decade since the appearance of the most representative scholarly edition of Mikhail Kuzmin’s poetry, prose, drama and criticism in English, Selected Writings (Bucknell University Press), co-edited by Shvabrin. In the US, Shvabrin has taught Russian language, literature, and theater at UCLA, California State University at Northridge, and Princeton University. At present he is affiliated with the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.