Reminiscences of student days at Vilnius University

 Nabokov’s fictional retrospective first-person narratives rely on the “perfect-memory” convention, which is, however, sometimes laid bare or even subverted. This convention makes no inroads in Nabokov’s factorgraphic narratives, such as Speak, Memory and “Abram Gannibal.” This paper discusses the narrative techniques that replace the “perfect-memory” convention in the “childhood-adolescence-youth” part of Speak, Memory, and the way these techniques relate to Nabokov’s view of the workings of memory, in the context of some his literary and philosophical precursors.                                    

A program about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, marking the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Afterword to Dorothy Parker, "Lolita," trans. Aviad Stir.

Afterword by Leona Toker

An updated translation of ch. 10, “Discourse of Lent: Kafka’s ’A Hunger Artist’ and Shalamov’s ’The Artist of the Spade,’" of L. Toker Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010).

 Information about the early history of concentration camps can shed light on the meaning of Stephen Dedalus’s reference to “concentration camps sung by Mr. Swinburne” in the library episode of Joyce’s Ulysses. Having made their way into the text, external references enter an array of relationships with other narrative details of the novel. The semiological model of literary analysis can help us in balancing attention to the properties of the text and to contextual information, in choosing the relevant data for analysis, avoiding detours in pedagogical practice, and remaining alert to the ways in which the text refracts historical realities and provides a comment on them. The comment of Ulysses on concentration camps has a prophetic quality.