Eugene Onegin. New York, 1964

In a 1937 lecture delivered in Paris on the centennial of Pushkin's death, Nabokov claimed that reading Pushkin was "without a single exception . . . one of the glories of earthly life." By that time he had christened both Gorniy Put' [The Empyrean Path] and Mashen'ka [Mary] with epigraphs from Pushkin; he had created characters whose fates can ultimately be traced to their knowledge of, and faithfulness to, a Pushkinian ars gratia artis aesthetic (in The Defense, Despair, and Invitation to a Beheading); and had attacked the leading exponents of anti-Pushkin sentiment in the émigré community. Later he would complete "The Water Nymph," a verse play Pushkin had left unfinished. In 1937, too, he published Dar [The Gift], whose protagonist's artistic development "loosely parallels the path Russian literature took after the Golden Age of poetry in the 1820s. . . ." Pushkin's verse forms are seen throughout Dar, in the poetry written by Fyodor and embedded in prose form, as well. There, as in Pale Fire, Nabokov pays tribute to the verse novel form of Eugene Onegin.

By the time Nabokov reached Cornell in 1948, he had published his study of Gogol and translations of several poems by Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev. He often dictated to his students corrections to published translations for class use. After a plan to translate Onegin with Roman Jackobson and Cornell professor Marc Sfeztel fell through, and a proposal to collaborate with Edmund Wilson came to nothing, Véra suggested he complete Onegin on his own. He needed little prodding, and devoted the better part of a decade to the task of producing a literal translation, with two volumes of supplementary commentary. Its publication by the Bollingen Press engendered one of the most heated and public academic debates of the century, effectively ending his friendship with Wilson, his chief public critic.

The items listed below pertain to Nabokov's life and career and are the contents of the exhibition at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, on view from April 23 through August 21, 1999. This checklist, primarily of items from the Library's Nabokov Archive, is included here to provide a sense of the rich holdings in this special collection.

Vladimir Nabokov, Montreux Palace Hotel, 1964
Photographer unknown [Henry Grossman?]
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov
Notes on Prosody/Abram Gannibal
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press/Bollingen Series, 1964
Berg Collection

Aleksandr Pushkin
Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse
Translated from the Russian, with a commentary, by Vladimir Nabokov. 4 vols.
New York: Bollingen Foundation/Pantheon Books, 1964
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov
[Pushkin's life]
Holograph manuscript, ca. 1950s
Berg Collection

Aleksandr Pushkin
Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse
Translated from the Russian, with a commentary, by Vladimir Nabokov. Vol. 4
New York: Bollingen Foundation/Pantheon Books, 1964
Nabokov's copy, with his holograph corrections
Berg Collection

Aleksandr Pushkin
Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse
A new translation in the Onegin Stanza with an introduction and notes by Walter Arndt
New York: E. P. Dutton, 1963
Nabokov's copy, with his holograph annotations throughout
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov
Notes used in preparing volume 1 of his translation of Eugene Onegin
Holograph and typescript drafts, ca. 1950s (perhaps earlier)
Berg Collection