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Speaker(s): Marijeta Bozovic, Colgate University

The paper offers an unorthodox comparison between Vladimir Nabokov’s then-controversial parodic novel, Ada or Ardor (1969), and the far more combative anti-novels of Vladimir Sorokin, looking especially at Roman (1989) and Day of the Oprichnik (2006).

Nabokov’s English-language Ada seems the ideal locus for discussions of cultural flow: the planet Antiterra, Nabokov’s personal “world republic of letters,” transplants and crossbreeds his beloved languages and literatures. By annexing what he feared was a vanishing Russian tradition to that of the English-language modernist novel, Nabokov aimed not only to enter, but to re-imagine a canon of Western masterpieces with Russian literature as a central rather than a marginalized strain.

As if in direct response to such a diasporic transcultural imaginary, Sorokin’s anti-novel Roman superimposes the Russian novel against itself. The tropes and patterns of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russian novel are re-worked to bring out the darkest undertones. Roman offers a nightmare vision of Russian culture as remote and inbred. In the much later Day of the Oprichnik, Sorokin returns to his local dystopia with a neo-medieval Rus’: this time, the country is even surrounded by a reified metaphor, a Great Wall of Russia preventing contact with other cultures.

Bozovic’s juxtaposition of the two Vladimirs is playful, but also attempts its own form of transcultural critical inquiry by leaping across the rift between Russian literature abroad (especially dramatic in the case of Nabokov), and that of late and post-Soviet culture.

MARIJETA BOZOVIC is an Assistant Professor in Russian and Eurasian Studies at Colgate University. She is currently working on a monograph based on her dissertation, “From Onegin to Ada: Nabokov’s Canon and the Texture of Time.” Other recent publications include an article on Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, and the introduction to a volume on post-Yugoslav culture.