NABOKV-L discussion

In an article in today’s New York Times (Nov. 25, 2025), “I’m a Professor. A.I. Has Changed My Classroom, but Not for the Worse,” Nabokov features in a return to the blue book.

Many teachers have changed the way they test students. That often means returning to old-school pen-and-paper exams — thereby contributing to the comeback of the blue book, a horseshoe-crab-like relic of primordial ed tech that A.I. has saved from extinction….

Here is the reference:

I would like to give a “shout out” to Marilyn Edelstein.

I just read Marilyn Edelstein’s most excellent paper, “Pale Fire: The Art of Consciousness,” in “Nabokov’s 5th Arc.” (1982). I was stunned to find someone who had (in 1982) a take on Pale Fire that so closely aligns with my first reading of it in 2017. That is, her understanding of the three-part consciousness of man, as manifested in Kinbote, Shade, and Gradus.

From Shelley’s The Cenci:

What does everyone think of the new Vintage International edition covers for a few VN books, attached?  I've seen them in bookstores already.  Overall I'm not that impressed.  I guess I'm glad they reverted to The Defense.  Lolita has a new introduction too, which I'm also not that impressed by.

It seems obvious to me that Nabokov was writing under the influence of Hoffmann, or at least the culture that Hoffmann created.  I'm reaching out see if there's ever been an study tracing the Hoffmannian influences in VN's work.  The automannequins in KQK, obviously.  And that one seems to me to be his most "German" book.  But he never listed Hoffmann among his literary influences (though maybe by proxy through Poe).

What other examples can we think of that support the Hoffmann -> Nabokov pipeline?  The two authors read remarkably similarly to me.

Dear Nabokovians, 

Dear Nabokovians, 

I am writing a research paper about the intertextual parallels between “Lolita” and “The Price of Salt,” which is a 1952 lesbian romance novel by Patricia Highsmith (although to me it reads more like a novel about a creepy obsession).