This year's Oulanoff Lecture will be presented by Professor Galya Diment, Thomas L. & Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Faculty Fellow at the University of Washington.
Talk title: "Masters and servants: Upstairs and downstairs in Vladimir Nabokov's Russian and English writings"
In The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below, Bruce Robbins writes that: “Nearly every English novelist read today was raised by servants. And nearly every novelist must have experienced the division between masters and servants in the medium of novel-writing, language” (Robbins, 106). The same of course applies to many Russian writers born to noble families, among them not just the 19th nineteenth-century giants like Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Turgenev, but also Vladimir Nabokov. Russian servants and American maids flutter through Nabokov’s prose like different species of butterflies (some, if truth be told, too plump to flutter), until a character like Pnin’s Desdemona flies in and stays in one’s memory forever.
This event is sponsored by the Hongor Oulanoff Memorial Lecture Fund, with support from the Center for Slavic and East European Studies, and organized by the Slavic Literature and Culture Forum.
