Blackwell: The Quill and the Scalpel

The Quill and the Scalpel

Nabokov’s Art and the Worlds of Science

Stephen H. Blackwell

Most famous as a literary artist, Vladimir Nabokov was also a professional biologist and a lifelong student of science. By exploring the refractions of physics, psychology, and biology within his art and thought, The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov’s Art and the Worlds of Science, by Stephen H. Blackwell, demonstrates how aesthetic sensibilities contributed to Nabokov’s scientific work, and how his scientific passions shape, inform, and permeate his fictions.

Nabokov’s attention to holistic study and inductive empirical work gradually reinforced his underlying suspicion of mechanistic explanations of nature. He perceived chilling parallels between the overconfidence of scientific progress and the dogmatic certainty of the Soviet regime. His scientific work and his artistic transfigurations of science underscore the limitations of human knowledge as a defining element of life. In provocative novels like Lolita, Pale Fire, The Gift, Ada, and others, Nabokov advances a surprisingly modest epistemology, urging skepticism toward all portrayals of nature, artistic and scientific. Simultaneously, he challenges his readers to recognize in the arts a vital branch of human discovery, one that both complements and informs traditional scientific research.

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Parts: The Chekhovian Intertext

The Chekhovian Intertext

Dialogue with a Classic

Lyudmila Parts

In The Chekhovian Intertext Lyudmila Parts explores contemporary Russian writers’ intertextual engagement with Chekhov and his myth. She offers a new interpretative framework to explain the role Chekhov and other classics play in constructing and maintaining Russian national identity and the reasons for the surge in the number of intertextual engagements with the classical authors during the cultural crisis in post-perestroika Russia.

The book highlights the intersection of three distinct concepts: cultural memory, cultural myth, and intertextuality. It is precisely their interrelation that explains how intertextuality came to function as a defense mechanism of culture, a reaction of cultural memory to the threat of its disintegration.

In addition to offering close readings of some of the most significant short stories by contemporary Russian authors and by Chekhov, as a theoretical case study the book sheds light on important processes in contemporary literature: it explores the function of intertextuality in the development of Russian literature, especially post-Soviet literature; it singles out the main themes in contemporary literature, and explains their ties to national cultural myths and to cultural memory. The Chekhovian Intertext may serve as a theoretical model and impetus for examinations of other national literatures from the point of view of the relationship between intertextuality and cultural memory.

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Mandelker: Framing Anna Karenina

Framing Anna Karenina

Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel

Amy Mandelker

Amy Mandelker's feminist reinterpretation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina challenges prevailing critical notions of Tolstoy as a misogynist and Anna Karenina as a classic realist novel. Instead, Mandelker reads Tolstoy as a radical feminist at the vanguard of Russia's “woman question” debates and Anna Karenina as a modernist novel that breaks tradition.

Mandelker's revisionist analysis begins with the contention that Anna Karenina rejects the textual conventions of realism and the stereotypical representation of women, especially in Victorian English fiction. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy uses the theme of art and visual representation to articulate an aesthetics freed from gender bias and class discrimination. As Mandelker shows, Tolstoy compares the theme of the representation of women in society with the representation of women in art to critique Western bourgeois traditions that trivialize the beautiful as a feminine category in aesthetics and a purchasable commodity in society. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy both creates and theorizes an aesthetics that transcends boundaries and liberates the individual.

An important and compelling work, Framing Anna Karenina is essential reading for scholars and students of Russian and Victorian literature, particularly those interested in feminist approaches to nineteenth-century novels.

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