Violana, Aleksandra. A Surface Reading of Vladimir Nabokov. 2024

What does it mean for a text to be ‘transparent’? If in order to be considered such, as the Oxford English Dictionary among others tells us, a thing must either be ‘easily seen’ or else ‘easily seen through’, what does this contradiction embedded into the term mean for the reader of transparent things? Vladimir Nabokov engages precisely this line of inquiry in the 1972 Transparent Things, his penultimate text before his death in 1977. In doing so, Nabokov also articulates a particular understanding of and attraction to transparency which has permeated his body of works since at least the 1920s and which, in this emphatic iteration, serves to complicate the notion of any stability in the roles of ‘authors’ and ‘readers’; to dismantle the dichotomous logic of the categories of ‘surface’ and ‘depth’; and, finally, to advocate for that which appears as ‘surface’ as the space where writing, reading and criticism are at their most fluid, inventive and kaleidoscopic.