St Petersburg Nabokov Museum

News from Tatyana Ponomareva, Director of the St. Petersburg Vladimir Nabokov
Museum

The Museum is located in the old Nabokov home at
47 Bol'shaya Morskaya and visitors are always welcome.

Museum email: [email protected]

Dear Fellow Nabokovians, many of you might be interested in how the Nabokov Museum in St.Petersburg is doing these days. We are alive and working. Apart from our daily work of preserving VN's childhood home and showing it to our visitors we organize frequent conferences,lectures and seminars. From now on we'll keep you informed of our most
interesting events.

As for the vast archive of our programs you will soon be able to find it on our official website due to open by the end of this year (sheer superstition prevents me from the telling you the exact URL now when it's not ready yet). The latest event (October 29) was the round-table discussion prompted by the recent showing of films by the German director R.W.Fassbinder, by now a recognized European classic in several local theaters. One of his most notable films was Despair or Journey into Light. The Nabokov Museum brought together about 70 people for the discussion. Actually, the attendance was even higher than we had expected. Among the participants were St.Petersburg
cinematographers, film scholars and also many readers and viewers.

About half of the audience were college students. Nina Savchenko, a well-known philosopher and critic was the moderator. Of the local Nabokov scholars Vera Polischuk, Svetlana Slivinskaya and Alexei Sklyarenko were present and active. Miraculously, the discussion did not split into two parallel flows but focused on the central topic,i.e. VN's novel as perceived by Fassbinder and by the audience. Not
that the discussants found much in common between the writer and the film director (one of the obvious differences was the choice of the second title for the film which even the film scholars found hard to explain). Still, the discussion proved to be intense and vibrant and all the participants and listeners agreed that new insights and ideas were brought home to them. Our next event will take place on November 15 and it has already been announced by our moderator, Evgeny Belodubrovsky. We will talk about VN's years spent in the Tenishev School in Petersburg. Many of the school books, now rarity items, will be delivered from the Russian National Library for the occasion.

Please wait for the detailed report of the event.