Vladimir Nabokov's Jewish muse

Abstract

This thesis characterises Vladimir Nabokov’s engagement with Jewishness, offering a broad yet extensive perspective covering the author’s entire oeuvre, substantiated by granular close reading of individual characters and scenes. This reading is bolstered by archival findings and paratextual sources, as well as by paying keen attention to historical, literary and political contexts that situate Nabokov amidst a wider and troubled tradition of representational challenges. I am guided by thinking which incorporates theories of the Jew through depictions of the body, gender, sex and race, as well as reflecting on Jewish identity, defined as a cultural subject, victim of politics and history, and foil to other ethnic types. Thus, through the framework of the Jewish Muse, I demonstrate how Nabokov presents the Jew as the other (a term which I situate and problematise for my usage) in multiple ways, responding to and challenging binary thinking in both Jewish studies and existing Nabokov scholarship. Crucially, this approach revises various of the dominant assumptions about Nabokov as an author by elucidating a much neglected but essential leitmotif, thus contributing to wider studies concerned with the appropriation, pursuit and representation of those deemed to be other. Drawing on Derrida’s theory of shibboleth I seek to characterise Nabokov’s literary pursuit of the Jew as one which reflects his own feelings of being an outsider, and his authorial desire to access and express the ungraspable. Via the types of ‘The Other’, ‘The Jewess’, ‘The Vulgarian’ and ‘The Helper’ I showcase the scope and diversity of Nabokov’s Jewish Muse in both his Russian and English texts.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Anoushka Alexander-Rose: orcid.org/0009-0007-7365-5226

ORCID for Claire Le Foll: orcid.org/0000-0003-2261-6431

Catalogue record

Export record