Missed Connections: What Nabokov Saw and Didn't See in Proust and Tolstoy

A talk by Eric Naiman of the University of California, Berkeley.

Vladimir Nabokov tried his hardest to establish a relationship between Marcel Proust and Leo Tolstoy. There are various reasons why he wanted to bring them together, but he was so eager that he missed the most important thing. This talk explores some of the shared affinities among these three writers and offers new insight into the linkage between Nabokov's predecessors.

Eric Naiman is a professor in the departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include: early Soviet culture, Russian law and society, gender studies, Andrei Platonov,  the history of Soviet medicine, and Vladimir Nabokov. He is the author of Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton University Press, 1997), Nabokov, Perversely  (Cornell University Press, 2010), and many other publications.

Sponsored by the Russian department. Free and open to the public.