From: senderovich <[email-masked]>
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 11:10:16 -0400

        Kiran K. recently has enthusiastically recommended Gavriel
Shapiro's article on Nabokov's signatures. His expertise must be
balanced by the opinion of a different expert, Alexander Dolinin of
University of Wisconsin at Madison and Pushkin House, St. Petersburg.
In a recent article Dolinin wrote:

"A great interest in seemingly forgotten topic, anagrams in Nabokov,
has recently flared up.  Gavriel Shapiro, for example, in his recent
work, discovered a whole series of anagrams in Nabokov's Invitation
to a Beheading. The methodology of these discoveries is highly
dubious. He takes a fragment of a text, e.g., three-four lines and
extracts from them, by manipulating letters, name or
name-cum-patronimic of Nabokov (Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, or
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov-Sirin). This method is statistically
absurd, for in any fragment of a text taken at random from any piece
of Russian prose, one can, given a desire, to discover, by the same
token, almost any namne-cum-partonomic or last name. I checked the
fragments suggested by Shapiro in his writings and easily discovered
in them Vladimir Ilich Ulianov-Lenin, Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi and
Alexader Alexeevich Dolinin." (A. Dolinin, "Of some anagrams in the
work of Vladimir Nabokov," -- Culture of Russian Diaspora: Vladimir
Nabokov - 100, Tallinn, 2000, p. 99. Transl. from the Russian by me.
S.S.).

*********************
Savely Senderovich
Professor of Russian Literature & Medieval Studies

Dept. of Russian Lit.
226 Morrill Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853

Tel: 607/255-8350. Fax: 607/255-2044