Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0001984, Mon, 7 Apr 1997 15:56:21 -0700

Subject
Sports in VN (fwd)
Date
Body
From: ESAMPVN@aol.com

The signing of Dmitri Not-Vladimirovich Nabokov by the Chicago Blackhawks set
off a series of postings re: hockey & soccer in VN, including DN's: "If by
'events' one means spectator sports...only the hockey game in KAMERA OBSCURA
comes to mind, besides some university soccer elsewhere based on Cambridge
recollections.... If one has in mind more private sports, there's tennis,
besides LOLITA, in "La Veneziana" and the unreturnable sliding shot imagined
by .......... in .........." [...] "I'm sure sports flicker in other fiction
of his as well, non-competetive skiing...for example..."

More years ago than I like to remember, I gave a paper on sports in VN at an
MLA Nabokov session. A version of that paper has now been included in a
Festschrift for Charles Moser, AND MEANING FOR A LIFE ENTIRE, to be published
this summer by Slavica. Having discussed tennis in LOLITA as part of an
earlier article (in RUSSIAN LANGUAGE JOURNAL XXXVI, Nos. 123-24. 1982), in
this paper I focused on tennis and skiing in TRANSPARENT THINGS (with
attention to ..........'s unreturnable serve), and soccer in GLORY. So it
was fun to see that soccer, tennis and skiing were the sports that first came
to DN's mind in this connection.

Earl Sampson
Boulder, Colorado