Vladimir Nabokov and the fictions of memory

Day One: 22 September 2016

8.00-8.30 – Registration

8.30-8.45 – Conference Opening, Room S302

8.45-10.15 – Keynote Lecture Weaving in Time: Nabokov’s Magic Carpet – Stephen Blackwell, Professor and Chair, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville,
USA, Room: S302

10.15-10.30 – Coffee Break

10.30-12.00 – Panel 1: Stage-managing Memory: The Author and his Creatures, Chair: Adam Lipszyc, Room: S302

• Memory’s Invisible Managers: The Case of Luzhin – Mikołaj Wiśniewski, SWPS University, Warsaw, Poland
• Supreme Indifference”: Some Fictions of Memory – Soelve I. Curdts, Heinrich-HeineUniversität Düsseldorf, Germany
• Memory (Re)imagined: Nabokov and Gombrowicz – Katherina B. Kokinova, Independent Scholar

12.00-12.15 – Coffee Break

12.15-13.45 – Panel 2 Memory Seeing: Autobiographical Fictions, Chair: Valery Timofeev, Room: S302

• Memory, Image and Compassion: Nabokov and Benjamin on Childhood – Adam Lipszyc, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology PAS, Warsaw, Poland
• Caravelles Encircled by White Birds. Speak, Memory: Memoirs or Fiction? – Gerard de Vries, Independent Scholar
• Time and Space between Autobiography and Photographs in Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory – Benjamin Taylor, University of Nottingham, UK

13.45-14.30 – Lunch Break

14.30-16.00 – Panel 3 Memory’s Flash: Short Stories, Chair: Leona Toker, Room: S302

• Orpheus Myth in „The Return of Chorb” and „The Visit to the Museum” as Nabokov’s Tragedy of Non-Return – Georgi Abdushelishvili, St. Petersburg State University, Russia
• Literary Memory in „A Forgotten Poet” – Péter Tamás, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary
• „The Vane Sisters” by Vladimir Nabokov and the Hermeneutics of Memory and Death – Małgorzata Hołda, The Pontifical University of JP II, Cracow, Poland

16.00-16.15 – Coffee Break

16.15-17.45 – Panel 4 Nabokov’s Search for the Lost Time, Chair: Gerard de Vries, Room: S302

• In His Own Words – Vladimir Nabokov between Memory and Literature – Jagoda Mytych, Institute of Journalism, Media and Social Communication Jagiellonian University, Poland
• The Smell of Memory in Vladimir Nabokov's Mary – Dorota Mieszek, Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, Poland
• Memory as Fabulation in Nabokov’s „Ultima Thule” – Valery Timofeev, St. Petersburg State University, Russia

17.45-21.00 – Excursion to the Old Town

Day 2: 23 September 2016

9.00-10.30 – Keynote Lecture Nabokov’s Factography – Leona Toker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, Room: S302

10.30-10.45 – Coffee Break

10.45-12.15 – Panel 5 Memory Tricks, Memory Transparencies, Chair: Stephen Blackwell, Room: S302

• Memories Trick; Memories Mix: Transparent Things – Akiko Nakata, Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan
• Transparent Things, Invisible Men – Carlo Comanducci, Independent Scholar
• Shuffling Pages of Nabokov’s „Fame” – Daniel Sirgeyev, St. Petersburg State University, Vladimir Nabokov Museum, Russia

12.15-12.30 – Coffee Break

12.30-13.30 – Panel 6 Obsessions of Memory: Lolita Chair: Irena Księżopolska, Room: S302

• Memory as Obsession: Is There a Suitable Wife for Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert? – Ljuba Tarvi, Helsinki University, Finland
• Time and Memory in Nabokov’s Lolita and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu – Dana Dragunoiu, Carleton University, Canada

13.30-14.30 – Lunch Break

14.30-15.30 – Special Lecture Memory Speaking in the Nabokov House – Tatiana Ponomareva, Vladimir Nabokov Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, Room: S302

15.30-15.45 – Coffee Break

15.45-16.45 – Panel 7 Palimpsest of Memory, Chair: Mikołaj Wiśniewski, Room: S302

• Nabokov's Ontoentomology – Piotr Graczyk, Institute of Culture, Jagiellonian University, Poland
• Merging of the Objective, the Subjective and the Imaginary in Nabokov's Works – Vyatcheslav Bart, Tel Aviv University, Israel

16.45-17.00 – Coffee Break

17.00-18.00 – Panel 8 Mechanics of Memory, Chair: Tatiana Ponomareva, Room: S307

• Набоковская Мнемозина и концепт памяти в русской религиозной философии – Boris Averin, St. Petersburg State University, Maria Virolainen, Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), RAS, Russia
• Воспоминание и бессознательная родовая сакрализация – Olga Dmitrienko, St. Petersburg State University of Technology and Design, Russia

18.00-18.15 – Coffee Break

18.15-19.15 – Panel 9E Memory’s Echoes, Memory’s Counterfeits, Chair: Dana Dragunoiu, Room: S302

• Biographer as an Imposter: Banville and Nabokov – Irena Księżopolska, Vistula University, Warsaw, Poland
• Time, History and Other Phantoms in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – Andrzej Księżopolski, University of Warsaw, Poland

18.15-19.15 – Panel 9R Nabokov’s Waltz: Poems, Notes and Quotes, Chair: Daniel Sirgeyev, Room: S307

• Россия как зрительная память: попытка прочтения нескольких стихов Владимира Набокова – Mitsuori Sagae, Soka University, Tokyo, Japan
• Фюзеляж бабочки или вокруг да около набоколо – Evgeny Belodubrovski, St. Petersburg Union of Scholars

19.15-19.30 – Conference Closing, Room: S302

19.30 – Conference Dinner „Pasta”, Kamionkowska 48A

Conference Program »

“Weaving in Time: Nabokov’s Magic Carpet”

Stephen Blackwell, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Nabokov’s art figures a constant tension between abundance and loss, between imprisonment and freedom. We see these parallel antinomies play out in Cincinnatus’s cell or the bars of Humbert’s real and metaphorical prisons, juxtaposed with escapes performed by Luzhin, Pnin, or Cincinnatus. In Nabokov’s worlds, unidirectional time is a prison, but memory appears to offer an escape. Not only people, but also inanimate things have memory, and it was this crucial insight that allowed Nabokov to successfully plot the arrival and diversification of certain blue butterflies in the New World over the course of millions of years. Cincinnatus preserves the memory of the ancients (Pushkin, Gogol) in his confinement, and these figures provide the foundation for his liberation at the novel’s end. In a different sense, remembering (re-collecting, reviving) old literature in Lolita is one of the ways for the reader to escape from Humbert’s solipsistic narrative. Many of Nabokov’s texts weave memory and time together – not just for the characters, but for the reader, too. His injunction to reread, to transform the linear into the planar, rests on the practice of memory and the labor of multiple artistic readings, in order to create the illusion of overcoming temporality. Nabokov’s novels remember each other – even, sometimes, like Fyodor in The Gift, remembering future novels (just as Boris Shchyogolev outlines a prototype for Lolita). His magic carpet, which is also his time machine (and which appears in many guises throughout his works), allows him and his characters to weave through past and future. Soaring, and folding deceptively, the escape it offers provides only a fleeting ecstasy, a “relief from the itch of being,” as Nabokov calls it in the forward to Glory. This relief, or “palliative,” Nabokov suggests, may be the only inkling humans can achieve of an existence beyond the prison of time.

“Nabokov’s Factography”

Leona Toker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Nabokov’s fictional retrospective first-person narratives rely on the “perfect-memory” convention, which is, however, sometimes laid bare or even subverted. This convention makes no inroads in Nabokov’s factographic narratives, such as Speak, Memory and “Abram Gannibal.” This paper discusses the narrative techniques that replace the “perfect-memory” convention in the “childhood-adolescence-youth” part of Speak, Memory, and the way these techniques relate to Nabokov’s view of the workings of memory, in the context of some of his literary and philosophical precursors.