Dear All,

I think people professionally engaged in the humanities tend to make works of art relevant to what they perceive as the cultural demands of the now and here. They depend upon their personal perceptions in doing so, but their professional status guarantees that their perceptions are adequate to the public notions of those cultural demands. In other words, scholarship is part of the public sphere, and a scholar’s work is always connected to, and is nourished by, his or her culture.

I’d suggest that Alexander Dolinin’s work is very important in the context of contemporary Russian culture in that it forms the basis of a ‘Russian’ understanding of VN’s work (which does not prevent it from being interesting to non-Slavists). There is, if you will, a cultural meaning to Dolinin’s work.

By the same token, I fail to see any meaning in Joanne Morgan’s work. Ms Morgan’s (and Mr Centerwall’s) theory reminds me of the determined efforts of a certain person on the Shakespeare list to prove that Shakespeare was a crypto-Jew. Both theories exist on the fringe of scholarship; the proponents of both theories build their argument not on positive evidence, but rather on a lack of contrary evidence (no matter Shakespeare never said he was not a Jew, it was because he was afraid of the consequences; no matter VN never said he was a pedophile, it was because he feared the consequences); and both theories are founded on dementedly complicated codes supposedly cracked by the authors. Perhaps, it would have never happened if Shakespeare were not the best known literary name in the world, and LOLITA were not one of the most popular novels of the last century. Public sphere (scholarship) presupposes responsibility, whereas popular sphere does not. A subtle distinction.

Best,

Sergey