A recurrent theme of narratives by concentration-camp survivors is reciting poetry. For intellectuals in the camps, reciting verses was an aid to survival, aloophole of mental freedom, available only when the prisoners were not being driven to depletion at “general works.” Poetry also facilitated genuine human contact, helped the prisoners inscribe themselves into specific historical and cultural traditions, and re-mediated the verses that belonged to those traditions. The latter function of poetry recital was operative not only during the imprisonments but also during the composition of the narratives after the liberation: the memoirists not only found meanings in the cultural traditions on which their sense of identity depended but also helped to maintain these traditions for their own sake.

Vladimir Nabokov's pre-war Russian language short stories were translated into English, whether by his son Dmitri or by others, but, in the novelist's lifetime, always "in collaboration with the author." The extent of this collaboration sometimes amounts to self-translation, that is, not to improving the text but to changing its details, the way a translator has no right to do while the author is entitled to revisions. Most often such changes were made in the awareness of the horizons of the new audience; but they also reflect modified attitudes to the material and suggest which meanings it was important for Nabokov to emphasize and which it was important for him to preclude. We discuss such traces of self-translation in three of Nabokov's short stories, "Torpid Smoke," "Details of a Sunset," and "Spring in Fialta."

Book review

The essay demonstrates the relationship between specific figures of discourse dominant in particular novels and the thematic concerns or plot patterns of each individual novel. The figures discussed are (1) enthymeme, prominent in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and important also in Joyce’s Ulysses; (2) hypallage, part of the rhetoric of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, reflecting its plot pattern and its cluster of concerns; and (3) blazon, which helps to convey the implied author’s critique of the attitudes of the first-person narrator of Lolita.

The article deals with the ways in which the memoirs of Il'ia Ehrenburg, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Emma Gershtein, and Raisa Orlova testify to their authors’ life during the Stalinist terror and to the fates of their contemporaries who fell victim to persecutions. Ehrenburg compared his having avoided arrest during the years of terror to having drawn a lucky lottery ticket: indeed, though each of the four memoirists took various measures to escape repres-sions, a great deal depended on sheer luck. Nevertheless, there was also the authors'  partial concurrence with the ide-ology of the Soviet system. These are issues that Lidiia Ginzburg called ‘areas of identification’ or ‘points of compatibility’, that is, aspects of the Soviet reality with which even the criticsof the regime consented, feeling a genuine inner need to cultivate such consent.

In the final episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Molly Bloom recollects how, in response to a priest’s question “where,” she returned an answer not about a part of her body but about a geographical location. This alludes to an episode of similar cross purposes of Widow Wadman and Uncle Toby in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. The interplay between the two texts is associated with the positive valorization of ambiguity on the part of the narrator of Tristram Shandy. In Sterne’s novel, legal and contractual definitions which seek to eliminate all ambiguity are, like Uncle Toby’s fortifications, a temptation for the forces of entropy: instead of shielding the characters from the intrusions of chance, they expose Tristram to serio-comic catastrophes. In Ulysses disambiguation is not a defensive but an offensive weapon (“Unsheathe your dagger definitions”; 238). In both cases, but particularly in Ulysses, the valorization of ambiguity in discourse is parallel to structural ambiguities that give rise to diametrically opposite readings. Ambiguity emerges not just as a matter of narrative rhetoric but as a feature of the creative impulse behind the story worlds, and as a challenge to the ethics of reading.

This Introduction to the special issue devoted to Anatoly Kuznetsov, author of Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, dwells on the different aspects of the book’s importance, surveys the life of the author as intertwined with the history of this book, suggests a way of reading his other work in the light of Babi Yar, and notes the contributions of the articles collected in this issue.

In order to maintain the factographic pact with the reader, in non-fiction narratives the authors tend to refrain from relying on the “perfect-memory convention.” In particular, memoirs (prominently including Conrad’s narratives) tend to avoid detailed prolonged dialogues, and direct speech in them usually takes the form of memorable phrases or statements (sound bites) that are supposed to have engraved themselves in the author’s memory. In Conrad’s autobiographical works this tendency is complicated by the fact that some of the sound-bites are translations from other languages (hence with a touch of fictionalization, enhanced by an occasional withholding of names and other verification landmarks). Yet the more extensive use of direct speech in Conrad's A Personal Record may be associated with specific artistic goals or else with the author's keen awareness of touches of fictionalization.

Introduction to the anniversary issue of Partial Answers

In the 1920s, during his émigré life in interbellum Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov wrote a number of Christmas stories. These stories—“Christmas,” “The Christmas Story,” and “A Reunion”—were all composed and published at Christmastime and set on the eve of Russian Christmas (first week of January). While involving the traditional motifs of the Christmas-story genre, such as the combination of joy and sorrow as well as the motifs of epiphany, gift, care, and forgiveness, these narratives expand the scope of the genre to represent not communal religious values but a private ethical stance. The purity of commitments emerges as a criterion for successful inner life. The gifts are usually the gifts of the memory, cherished in “Christmas” and “A Reunion,” and forfeited in “The Christmas Story,” as well as in a counter-story, “A Matter of Chance,” which was also written at Christmas time but set August and published with half a year’s delay.