READING NABOKOV’S THE GIFT (“LE CAHIER ROSE” REVISITED), a lecture by GRIGORI UTGOF (Tallinn University, Estonia)

In this lecture Grigori Utgof will focus on one of the major twentieth-century novels Dar / The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov. Specifically, he will concentrate on issues of reading, transcribing, and publishing the holograph draft of the novel’s incomplete continuation, whose manuscript is preserved among Nabokov’s papers in his Library of Congress archival collection. This manuscript was previously described and partially reproduced by Brian Boyd (1990), Jane Grayson (1994, 1997), Alexander Dolinin (1997, 2004, 2019), and Yuri Leving (2011). As its recent publication in toto by Andrei Babikov (2015, 2019) has raised a controversy regarding dubious readings, Grigori Utgof will present a new transcription of the surviving fragments of the novel’s unwritten Part Two (so-called “Le cahier rose”) with due note taken of their relation to Dar / The Gift as we know it, and of the place they should occupy in a prospective definitive edition of the novel’s text.