The multiple Russian contexts of Nabokov's 'Onegin'

This study reconsiders Vladimir Nabokov's commentary to his translation of Eugene Onegin and interprets it as shaped by the culture and ideology of the Russian European diaspora that emerged in reaction to the cultural politics of Soviet Russia. Russian Contexts portrays Nabokov as a Pushkinist who paradoxically achieves the diaspora's mission of cultural preservation by presenting Onegin as a world text.; In Part One, after an overview of Russian and American criticism in response to Nabokov's Pushkin project (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 describes the reaction of the leading Russian poets to the post-revolutionary cultural politics. Their sense of the disruption of cultural history and Soviet culture's irreconcilable alienation from Pushkin and his age shaped Pushkin studies in the diaspora.; Chapter 3 proposes one of these poets, Vladislav Khodasevich, the leading Pushkin scholar of the diaspora, as Nabokov's model scholar. Nabokov either adopts or reconsiders many of Khodasevich's techniques as well as his innovative approach to biography and to Pushkin studies: particularly his resistance to hagiography, familiar attitude to the subject, emphasis on the creative agency of the critic, and focus on the creative process as a fulcrum of critical inquiry. Chapter 4 studies the methodological continuity between Khodasevich's Pushkin's Poetic Economy and Nabokov's Commentary.; Part Two then turns to Nabokov's intolerance of the Russian nationalist criticism that shaped his commentary. Chapter 5 juxtaposes the excesses of this criticism with Pushkin's own misgivings about "national" literature. Through the prism of Nabokov's commentary, Chapter 6 discusses Onegin as a text struggling to define itself against the Western literary tradition, while simultaneously turning to it, instead of to indigenous Russian sources, for its language, motives, and settings. This dual engagement with the novelistic tradition preconditions Nabokov's seemingly contradictory treatment of intertext in Onegin, discussed in Chapter 7. In presenting the artist rather than the people as primary cultural force, Nabokov undermines the monologizing politics of nationalist criticism, further aggravated by the cloistered Soviet culture. He does this by restoring the complexity of Onegin as a text about cultural hybridity and, in so doing, returns to Pushkin's language its original polyphony and multinationality.