Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0003839, Tue, 30 Mar 1999 09:00:06 -0800

Subject
Query: Artists in Nabokov's work (fwd)
Date
Body
From: Bart Eeckhout <Bart.Eeckhout@rug.ac.be>

Dear Nabokovians:

Half a year ago, the editor of a Belgian arts journal started on a
wonderfully madcap enterprise. He wanted to compose an _Encyclopedia of
Fictional Artists_ and contacted a series of collaborators to help him out.
The short-term result was two hefty installments for his journal with over
a hundred encyclopedic entries, but of course that was only the tip of the
iceberg. The madcap editor found a publisher interested in bringing out a
real book-length encyclopedia, and so now we're casting about our net again
to detect the lacunae in our first list.
One of the entries I took care of for the earlier installments was that of
"Frank" (no family name), the famous counterfeiter in Nabokov's early story
"La Veneziana." Since I'm only familiar with a handful of Nabokov's works,
however, I was wondering if this meant that I had missed out on other
artists appearing in the master's oeuvre. Needless to add, any other names
of (important) fictional artists in world literature are always welcome,
too, but I should warn you that our list is already more than 200 names
long and that this bit of sleuthing can become dangerously addictive.
Thanks in advance for your help.

Bart Eeckhout
University of Ghent
Belgium