Andrey Babikov

Andrey Babikov was born in 1974 in Zaporozh'e, Ukraine, and currently lives in Moscow, where he is studying literature while working as a lawyer for the Ukrainian Cultural Centre. His articles on Nabokov, Khodasevich, Bely, and Zatonsky have appeared in such periodicals as Collegium (Kiev), Graffiti (Kiev), Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (Moscow) and Nabokovskii vestnik (St. Petersburg). His contribution to Zembla is an essay on Sobytie (The Event).

Gennady Barabtarlo

Gennady Barabtarlo was born in 1949 in Moscow. In the last year of what is known in the United States as "high-school," his early interest in poetry, and especially in the poetry of Pasternak, prompted him to abandon his plans to become a physicist for the sake of the Russian literature department at Moscow University. In 1972 he defended a graduate thesis on certain features of Pasternak's comparative stylistics in verse and prose. In the 1970s, Barabtarlo worked at the Pushkin Literary Museum as a research fellow and later as "vice-provost for research." In 1979 he left the Soviet Union with his wife and daughter, and after a few months in Europe settled in the United States. He entered the doctoral programme at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and received a PhD in 1984, having written a dissertation on Nabokov's Pnin, later published by Ardis as Phantom of Fact. Prior to earning his PhD, Barabtarlo had published several articles on Nabokov and a translation of Pnin into Russian, completed in consultation with Véra Nabokov, whom he visited many times in Montreux during the 1980s. Since 1984, he has been on the faculty of the University of Missouri, where he now chairs the department of German and Russian Studies. Among his published works there are numerous articles on Nabokov (some of which are collected in Aerial View, Peter Lang, 1993), and on Pushkin, Tiutchev, and Solzhenitsyn. Nabokov Sights, Barabtarlo's original photographs published in Zembla, are part of an ongoing project which, he points out "as Pushkin says in the preface to Eugene Onegin will likely never be completed." His other contributions to the site include an Index to the first thirty issues of The Nabokovian and essays on Invitation to a Beheading and Pnin.

Michael H. Begnal

Michael Begnal received his PhD from the University of Washington. He is the author of Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, A Conceptual Guide to Finnegans Wake, Narrator and Character in Finnegans Wake, Dreamscheme: Narrative and Voice in Finnegans Wake, and On Miracle Ground: Essays on the Fiction of Lawrence Durrell. Along with more than fifty essays on modern literature, his articles on Nabokov have appeared in Journal of Narrative Technique, College Literature, Modern Language Studies, and James Joyce Quarterly. His contributions to Zembla include two original critical essays, on The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister.

Thomas Bolt

Thomas Bolt was born in 1959 in Washington, D.C., where he attended public and private schools. He was a pre-college scholarship student at the Corcoran School of Art and received a B.A. in English (cum laude) and Art from the University of Virginia. His paintings have been shown in group exhibitions in New York. Land (1982), a hand-printed book of his poems and etchings, is in the rare book collections of the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia. Yale University Press published his first book of poems, Out of the Woods, in 1989. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, BOMB, and Southwest Review (where his long poem, "Wedgwood," won an award for the best poem the quarterly published in 1994).

Thomas Bolt's awards and fellowships include the Rome Prize for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Yale Younger Poets Prize, The Peter I. B. Lavin Younger Poet Award of the American Academy of Poets, an Ingram Merrill Fellowship, and a 1997 Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Bolt's poems are included in the anthology Sixty Years of American Poetry (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1996). Dark Ice, 1993-1997, a poem of 1,001 lines with notes and parodies of notes, was first published in BOMB (without the notes) in the fall of 1993. Publication of the hypertext Dark Ice on Zembla and the ASCII version on NABOKV-L mark the first publication of the work as a whole.

Marie C. Bouchet

Marie C. Bouchet was born in 1976. She holds a Ph.D. in American literature from the Université de Bordeaux in Bordeaux, France, and is currently Assistant Professor at the Université de Toulouse. In her thesis, which deals with images of maidens and girls in Nabokov's fiction, she makes use of stylistic, intertextual, and thematic analyses to highlight the importance of girls--those ephemeral, hybrid, doomed and beautiful figures--in Nabokov's aesthetics. Her contribution to Zembla is an essay entitled "Les métamorphoses de la beauté ou la jeune fille nabokovienne."

Brian Boyd

Brian Boyd is the author of the definitive biography of Nabokov, published by Princeton University Press in two volumes (1990 and 1991), as well as Nabokov's Ada (Ardis, 1985) and a continuing series of annotations to Ada that appear in The Nabokovian now available as ADAonline. His contributions to Zembla include an article on the chronology of Lolita that originally appeared in Nabokov Studies #2, and what may be the definitive article on the Pale Fire authorship question that originally appeared in Nabokov Studies #4. His book Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery was published by Princeton University Press in 1999. He edited Lolita and Nabokov's other English-language novels for two volumes in the Library of America, and co-edited (with Robert Michael Pyle) Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings. He is on the editorial board for the Pléiade edition of Nabokov's collected novels. Currently he is co-editing a collection of Nabokov's verse translations, Verses and Versions, with Stanislav Shvabrin, for Harcourt, and co-editing Nabokov's letters to his wife Véra with Olga Voronina.

Nora Buhks

Nora Buhks is a professor at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). She has written extensively on Nabokov, in both Russian and French, and edited a special issue of Cahiers de l'émigration russe entitled Vladimir Nabokov et l'émigration (Institut d'etudes slaves, 1993). She is also the author of Le journalisme de la pérestroïka (Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1988) on the political aspects of journalism in the Soviet Union. Her contribution to Zembla is an essay on Korol', dama, valet (King, Queen, Knave), originally published in French in the Revue des études slaves in 1987.

David Cohen

David Cohen is a recent graduate of Williams College, where his submission to Zembla, "My Potential Patients," was written as a senior-year honors thesis. At Williams, David was an enthusiastic jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, and bandleader, an active member of several English Department student committees, and a residential advisor to first-year students. He will be spending the 2005-06 school year as a teaching intern at Bilkent University Preparatory School in Ankara, Turkey, after which he plans to pursue graduate studies in clinical psychology. David welcomes questions and comments through e-mail.

Neil Cornwell

Neil Cornwell is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Vladimir Nabokov (in the series "Writers and Their Work": Northcote House, 1999). He has also published essays on "Fantastic-Gothic Elements in Nabokov’s Despair" (in Neo-Formalist Papers: Rodopi, 1998), "Nabokov and Henry James" (in Nabokov’s World, Volume 2: Palgrave, 2002), and "From Sirin to Nabokov: the Transition to English" (in The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov: Cambridge UP, 2005). He is also an editor of the online Literary Encyclopedia, with responsibility for Nabokov (as well as for Russian literature and for Henry James). His contribution to Zembla is "Intimations of Lo: Sirens, Joyce and Nabokov's Lolita."

His other books include two studies of Vladimir Odoevsky (1986, and 1998), The Literary Fantastic (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), James Joyce and the Russians (Macmillan, 1992) and, most recently, The Absurd in Literature (Manchester UP, 2006). He has translated collections of works by Odoevsky (1992), and Daniil Kharms (1993: reprinted 2006), as well as Mayakovsky’s My Discovery of America (2005). His edited books include the Reference Guide to Russian Literature (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), the "New Casebook" on James’s The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew (with Maggie Malone: Macmillan, 1998), The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (Rodopi, 1999), and The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature (Routledge, 2001).

Maurice Couturier

Maurice Couturier is a professor of English and American literature at the University of Nice. He is a specialist of Nabokov, on whom he has published three books, including the first French monograph on VN, titled simply Nabokov (L'Age d'homme, 1979). In 1993 and 1995 Couturier organized international Nabokov conferences in Nice and edited the papers from both events. Currently he is serving as the editor-in-chief of the Pléiade edition of Nabokov's novels. In addition to many articles in French and English on Nabokov and other English and American contemporary authors, he has published on the theory of the novel, his most recent books being La Figure de l'auteur (Le Seuil, 1995) and Roman et censure (Champ Villon, 1996). He has translated novels by Nabokov and by British author David Lodge, and published an original novel entitled La polka piquée (L'Age d'homme, 1982). Couturier's contributions to Zembla are an excerpt from Roman et censure on Nabokov's novels Lolita and Ada, a brief article on the Shadean controversy surrounding Pale Fire, a section from his book La figure de l'auteur on authorial voice in Nabokov's works, the text of a talk given at the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia on Lolita, an English translation of the introduction to his most recent book, Nabokov ou la cruauté du désir, and an English translation of a chapter from the book on Glory.

Alexander Dolinin

Alexander Dolinin holds a PhD from Leningrad State University (1977) and is Professor of Slavic Languages at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he specializes in 19th and 20th century Russian literature. He is the author of many articles in both Russian and English on Nabokov. His contributions to Zembla are an article on Otchayanie (Despair) and Dostoevsky, an earlier version of which was read at the International Nabokov Conference in Nice in 1995, an article on "Signs and Symbols", an article on a real-life source for Lolita, and a chapter from his book Istinnaia zhizn' pisatelia Sirina: Raboty o Nabokove (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii Proekt, 2004) on Pushkinian subtexts in Invitation to a Beheading.

Alexander N. Drescher

Alexander N. Drescher is a pediatrician turned psychiatrist, living on a farm in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. He taught medical students and resident physicians until his retirement. A hobbyist, he reads a few authors comprehensively, drives Haflinger horses and restores old sleighs. His contributions to Zembla are a discussion of musical analogies in The Defense, an essay on "That in Aleppo Once...," and a new reading of "Signs and Symbols."

Jeff Edmunds

Jeff Edmunds, creator and editor of Zembla, is a cataloging specialist at the University Libraries of the Pennsylvania State University, whose server is home to Zembla. His texts have appeared in Nabokov Studies, The Slavic and East European Journal, McSweeney's, and Formules (Paris, France), among others. Translated into Russian, his work has appeared in Nezavisimaia gazeta, Novaia IUnost', and Inostrannaia literatura. In 2003, his tale La feintise was published with Jean Lahougue's La ressemblance (a rewriting of Nabokov's Despair) by Les Impressions Nouvelles. In addition to designing and overseeing the site, Edmunds has contributed an annotated bibliography of French Nabokov criticism; regular updates to Dieter E. Zimmer's bibliographies of Nabokov criticism; and translations of critical articles from the French (one by Nora Buhks, two by Christine Raguet-Bouvart, and one by Maurice Couturier), from the Russian (by Vladislav Khodasevich and by Alexander Dolinin), and from the Japanese (by Yuichi Isahaya, by Akiko Nakata, and by Tadashi Wakashima).

Jeff Edmunds in Nice, France, 2006

Jerry Friedman

Jerry Friedman was born in 1961 in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up in its suburbs. He received a Ph. D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993, a few years after deciding he didn’t want to be a research physicist. He worked as a science writer at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1990 to 1994; taught physics, mathematics, and elementary electronics at Northern New Mexico Community College (now Northern New Mexico College) from 1994 to 2001; and has been teaching physics and sometimes mathematics at Santa Fe Community College (New Mexico) since then. His few publications are poems in minuscule magazines and physics papers. His contribution to Zembla is a timeline of Pale Fire.

Sarah Anastasia Hahn

Sarah Anastasia Hahn is an internationally renowned graphic designer and artist. Her areas of interest include the application of traditional design principles to dynamic digital media, interface design, and navigational concepts. She graduated with Honors from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, where she is currently completing her Master's Degree in Digital Media. Hahn is member of the Board of Directors of Art Center's Alumni Council. Hahn's digital designs have appeared in several books and have been showcased in several exhibitions, including the Milia '96 New Talent Pavilion. Before starting her design career, she studied piano, classical voice and opera at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich. She is co-founder, Vice-President, and Creative Director of , an innovative design firm based in Los Angeles and Vienna specializing in new media. Hahn was largely responsible for the design of the previous version of Zembla, including the blue motif, the butterfly button, and graphics for the main page, the Lolita Effect section, and the Nabokronology. Many of these elements have been retained for the current version of the site.

John Hamilton

John Hamilton is the corporate identity of a colony of rogue mitochondria currently residing in Central Pennsylvania. He, or they, compiled, designed, and wrote the Works and Biography sections of Zembla.

Jacqueline Hamrit

After receiving a BA at the University of Montpellier (France), Jacqueline Hamrit spent two years in the United States as a teaching assistant, first at Mount Holyoke College and then at the University of California at Davis, where she earned an MA in French. In 1990 she secured the agrégation and was recruited by the University of Lille. Her doctoral thesis is entitled “Boundaries and Limits in Nabokov’s Work.” She has published articles on Nabokov and Derrida. Her contribution to Zembla is an essay on French echoes in "Mademoiselle O."

Donald Harington

Donald Harington is a professor of art history at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he has lived for many years, using his spare time to write eleven novels about the mythical Ozark mountain village of Stay More. The most recent, to be published in September of 1998 by Counterpoint, is called When Angels Rest, not as overtly Nabokovian as Ekaterina, but in its evocations of childhood obviously indebted to Speak, Memory. Selections from Ekaterina (Harcourt Brace, 1993) are available in Zembla.

William H. Howe

William H. Howe is a well-known illustrator and lepidopterist whose original paintings of butterflies and moths are held in the collection of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. He is the author of The Butterflies of North America (W.C. Brown, 1961) and Our Butterflies and Moths (True Color Pub., 1963). He graciously allowed his illustrations to be included in the excerpts from Dieter E. Zimmer's Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths in Zembla.

Wilson Hutton

Wilson Hutton is coordinator of the Penn State University Libraries website and editor/designer of the Voices of Central Pennsylvania Internet Edition. A writer, editor, graphic artist, and sometime drama critic, he adopted his current occupation and lifestyle after becoming entangled in the New York publishing scene, following a highly rewarding but comparatively unremunerative fourteen-year career in the theatre. After studying acting at Carnegie-Mellon University, he co-founded a traveling company that played every kind of venue from bars and church basements to the Edinburgh Festival and Lincoln Center. He has been a voice teacher, playwright, set designer, stage manager, road manager, radio performer, radio announcer, and movie extra, but mostly an actor and voice-over artist. His vocal characterizations in radio plays, movie soundtracks, and commercials have ranged from legendary British thespian Henry Irving to a talking Montgomery Ward lawnmower. His readings of Nabokov's first lines for Zembla is his first attempt at recording for the Web.

Sergey Il'in

Sergey Borisovich Il'in was born in 1948 in Saratov, the birthplace of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Aleksey Tolstoy, and artists Viktor Borisov-Musatov and Kuz'ma Petrov-Vodkin. He studied physics at the University of Saratov, graduating in 1971, and spent the next few years in Dubna completing graduate and post-graduate work on the general theory of relativity. He managed to avoid military service (in the forces of the KGB!) by relocating from Saratov to Moscow, where he worked as a teacher of physics and astronomy and later as a computer programmer. In 1982 he undertook, quite by chance, a translation of Pnin, and became so carried away by the project that he found himself unemployed and translating the rest of Nabokov's English works into Russian. Today he lives in Moscow with his wife and two children and their pet dog. His recent translation of Look at the Harlequins!, reviewed and approved with very minor changes by Dmitri Nabokov, is scheduled to be published soon. His contribution to Zembla is a memoir entitled "Moia zhizn' s Nabokovym" (My Life with Nabokov).

Yuichi Isahaya

Yuichi Isahaya was born in 1948 in Hitachi, Japan. Professor of Russian at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan, he has translated the first volume of Brian Boyd’s acclaimed biography Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (2003), and co-translated The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (2000-01) into Japanese. His publications include many articles on 19th-century Russian literature and Russian literature in emigration, some of which are available at his personal website. His research currently focuses on Russian culture in emigration as a whole. His contribution to Zembla is an article on the motif of lights and darkness in Glory.

D. Barton Johnson

D. Barton Johnson, Professor Emeritus of Russian at University of California at Santa Barbara, is the author of A Transformational Analysis of OT Constructions in Contemporary Standard Russian and Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov, as well as numerous articles on VN and other Russian modernists. A two-time president of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, he is the founder of NABOKV-L, the Electronic Nabokov Discussion Forum, and Nabokov Studies, an annual print journal. Johnson provided editorial advice and assistance in the creation of Zembla. His contributions to the site include an article on Nabokov's childhood reading habits and a photo-essay, co-authored with his wife, Sheila Golburgh Johnson, on Nabokov's sojourn in Ashland, Oregon. He can be reached via e-mail. (Photo by Galya Korovina.)

Sheila Golburgh Johnson

Sheila Golburgh Johnson is a poet, essayist, and freelance journalist. She is also editor of and contributor to the recent Shared Sightings (J. Daniel, 1995) a collection of contemporary poetry devoted to birds. She lives in Santa Barbara, California. Her contribution to Zembla is a photo essay on Nabokov's sojourn in Ashland, Oregon, co-authored with her husband, D. Barton Johnson. She can be reached via e-mail.

Josh Kaplan

Josh Kaplan was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1981. He is currently (Summer 2003) entering his senior year at Princeton University. His contribution to Zembla is an examination of Nabokov's private instructions to Kinbote in Pale Fire, and a gesture towards the dark fate those directives force upon the narrator as a result. The paper was his Fall '02 Junior Paper at Princeton. Josh can be contacted by e-mail.

Vladislav Khodasevich

Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939) was a Russian émigré poet and essayist whose work Nabokov esteemed highly. His very perceptive essay on Zashchita Luzhina (The Defense) appears here in English for the first time.

Charles Kinbote

Charles Kinbote is an independent scholar temporarily residing in Cedarn, Utana. His contribution to Zembla is Silvery Light: The Real Life of Vladimir Nabokov.

Eric Lemay

Eric LeMay's work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, and other magazines. He teaches Lolita (and other texts) at Northwestern University and The University of Chicago. In a puff of halitosis and harangue, Mr. A. Amis Tim handed him "Dolorous Laughter" outside of the Evanston Public Library.

Yuri Leving

Yuri Leving has published scholarly articles on various aspects of Russian literature and culture in English and Russian (The Explicator, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Novyi Zhurnal, Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Russian Language Journal, The Nabokovian, and many others). Leving also contributed to the first authorized Russian edition of the Collected Works of Vladimir Nabokov in five volumes (St. Petersburg: Symposium, 1999-2001), recognized by Western scholars as the definitive Nabokov collection in Russia, in which he annotated Nabokov’s short stories and poems. His book on Vladimir Nabokov, Vokzal -- Garazh -- Angar (Vladimir Nabokov i poetika russkogo urbanizma) [Train Station --Garage --Hangar (Nabokov and the Poetics of Russian Urbanism)], is forthcoming from the Ivan Limbakh Publishing House. Leving is currently at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He contributes to Zembla five notes on Nabokov's works.

Ewa Mazierska

Ewa Mazierska is Reader in Contemporary Cinema, Department of Humanities, University of Central Lancashire. Among her publications are numerous articles in Polish and English and several books, including Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller (I.B. Tauris, 2007); with Laura Rascaroli, Crossing New Europe: The European Road Movie (Wallflower Press, 2006); and From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2003). She also co-edited Relocating Britishness (MUP, 2004). She is currently working on a book about Jerzy Skolimowski. Her contribution to Zembla is an article about Skolimowski's film adaptation of Nabokov's King, Queen, Knave.

William Monroe

William Monroe is an associate professor of English and associate dean of the Honors College at the University of Houston. His publications include essays on Willa Cather and Flannery O'Connor and articles on performance in literature and medicine. His play Primary Care, written with the collaboration of the historian Thomas R. Cole, has been performed at conferences, professional meetings, and theaters in Texas, South Carolina, and Illinois. He directs "Common Ground," a collaborative institute for teachers of literature, and the project for the Study of Values in Civic Life and the Professions at the University of Houston. His contribution to Zembla is a chapter from his book Power to Hurt: The Virtues of Alienation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998) on Pale Fire.

J. Morris

J. Morris is a writer and musician living near Washington, D.C. "Signs and Symbols and Signs" appeared in The Nabokovian, No. XXXII, and "The Gliding Eye: Nabokov's Marvelous Terror" in The Southern Review, Winter 1998. He has published short fiction and poetry in many magazines in the U.S. and Great Britain, including The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, The Formalist, Poetry Nottingham International, Western Humanities Review, and Five Points. He teaches at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Md., and plays keyboards for The Grim Bunnies. His contribution to Zembla is an essay on the suspension of disbelief in Pale Fire.

Paul D. Morris

Paul D. Morris, shown here enjoying Crimean sun and water, holds a BA in English from Carleton University (Ottawa) and an MA and Ph.D. in Modern Languages from the University of Alberta (Edmonton). His interest in Nabokov stems from lengthy stays in two locations of relevance to Nabokov: St. Petersburg and the Crimea. Presently teaching in the Department of North American Studies at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken, Germany, where, among other things, he is seeking to establish a place for Canadian Studies between the citadels of English and American Studies, Morris is working on a study which treats the role of poetry in VN's oeuvre. As someone born in rural, northern Ontario, he is strangely fascinated by the idea that he can get on a bus in a city on Germany's western border with France and travel directly to Simferopol, Crimea. His contribution to Zembla is a set of three translations of early Nabokov criticism by Gleb Struve and M. Kantor.

Akiko Nakata

Akiko Nakata is Professor in the Department of English at Nanzan Junior College, Japan. She co-translated, with Tadashi Wakashima, Transparent Things (2002), and provided annotations to the novel for the same volume. She has published over two dozen articles in both Japanese and English on Nabokov and on contemporary American writers including William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and Bobbie Ann Mason. Her contributions to The Nabokovian include "Wittgenstein Echoes in Transparent Things", "Rose and Aquamarine: Liza in Pnin" (both available on her personal Web site) and a note on two scenes in Mary, which appears here in the context of her contribution to Zembla, "Repetition and Ambiguity: Reconsidering Mary."

Nakata co-founded the Nabokov Society of Japan in 1999 and has served as one of the organization's directors. She is also a member of the Kyoto Reading Circle, whose annotations to Ada and Ada Forum transcripts, which include contributions by Brian Boyd, have been published in the society's newsletter KRUG and on the organization's Web site.

Christine Raguet-Bouvart

Christine Raguet (-Bouvart) is Professor at the Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle, director of a research center in translation studies (TRACT) at the same institution, and director of a journal of translation studies, Palimpsestes. She has published more than two dozen articles, in both French and English, on Nabokov, as well as Henry James, other American and English authors and on translation studies. She is editor of a special issue of Europe (no. 791, 1995) devoted entirely to Nabokov, and author of LOLITA, un royaume au-delà des mers (Talence, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1996). She has translated two volumes of Nabokov's correspondence, and his novel Laughter in the Dark, into French. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Pléiade edition of Nabokov's collected works, where she is responsible for the annotation, commentary and revision of the translations of Laughter in the Dark, Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, The Enchanter, Pale Fire, Ada, and Transparent Things. Her contributions to Zembla are original essays on the translation theme in Bend Sinister and on the various versions of Kamera obskura/Camera Obscura/Laughter in the Dark.

Sam Schuman

Sam Schuman holds a BA from Grinnell College, an MA from San Francisco State University, and a PhD. in in non-Shakespearean Renaissance Drama from Northwestern University. He has taught at St. Mary's College of California and Cornell College, Mt. Vernon, Iowa. He directed the Honors Program at the University of Maine, and later served as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of English at Guilford College, Greensboro, North Carolina and then Chancellor and Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Asheville. Currently he is Acting Chancellor and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Minnesota, Morris.

Schuman served as President of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, and also a term as President of the National Collegiate Honors Council. His books include Vladimir Nabokov, A Reference Guide (G.K. Hall, 1979), a guide to secondary studies of Nabokov, and his contributions are included in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (Garland, 1995). His has published more than two dozen articles on Nabokovian subjects and made several presentations at professional meetings. Twice he has organized the Nabokov session at MLA. It was during Schuman's term as President of the Nabokov Society that the IVNS succeeded in becoming an affiliated organization of the MLA. His contibution to Zembla is an original essay on Lolita.

Thomas Seifrid

Thomas Seifrid received a B.S. in Wildlife Biology with a major in Russian from the University of Montana in 1978, then completed an M.A. and Ph.D. (1984) in Russian literature and culture at Cornell University. He taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon before taking up his present position in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California. His primary interests lie in the areas of twentieth-century Russian literature and culture, particularly of the Soviet 1920s and 1930s; in Russian philosophy of language of the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries; and the life and works of Vladimir Nabokov. He is currently working on a project that examines the prolific body of writings produced in Russia from roughly 1860 to 1930 devoted to defining the nature of language (or the Word, or Logos). His contribution to Zembla is an article on Kamera obskura that originally appeared in Nabokov Studies #3. Visit Seifrid's personal web page.

Maxim D. Shrayer

Maxim D. Shrayer was born in 1967 in Moscow, spent nine years as a refusenik with his family, and immigrated to the United States in 1987. He holds a PhD in Russian literature from Yale University. A Professor of Russian and English at Boston College, Shrayer is Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eastern Languages and Founding Co-Director of the Jewish Studies Program. His books include The World of Nabokov’s Stories (1999), Russian Poet/Soviet Jew (2000), and Genrikh Sapgir: An Avant-Garde Classic (2004, with David Shrayer-Petrov). A bilingual poet, prose writer, and translator, he has edited two collections of fiction by his father, the writer David Shrayer-Petrov. Shrayer’s Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature won the 2007 National Jewish Book Award in East European Studies. Shrayer’s most recent book is the literary memoir Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration. He lives in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, with his wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, and their daughters, Mira Isabella and Tatiana Rebecca. His contributions to Zembla are an article on Nabokov's short stories that originally appeared The Nabokovian and an excerpt from his book on Nabokov's stories entitled "Poetry, Exile, and Prophetic Mystification in 'Vasiliy Shishkov' (1939)."

Alexey Sklyarenko

Alexey Sklyarenko was born in Leningrad (now, once again, St. Petersburg) in 1970. He studied German language and literature at the Leningrad (St. Petersburg) State University. Soon after graduating from the University in 1993, he began to work, slowly and with the utmost care, on translating Ada into Russian. He considers his translation, completed only recently after several revisions, his greatest achievement. While working on the translation, he contributed notes on Ada to The Nabokovian. His contribution to Zembla, entitled "Aleksandr Blok's Dreams as Enacted in Ada by Van Veen--and Vice Versa," is a modified version of an article that originally appeared in The Nabokovian. He also offers a paper on Kamera obskura and slapped faces in Pushkin and Nabokov and an essay on the possible genealogy of poshlost' (both in Russian). Sklyarenko hopes to publish more articles discussing the many discoveries he has made while working on the Russian translation of Ada. (See also A. Sklepikov.)

Abraham P. Socher

Abraham P. Socher was educated at UCLA, Harvard and Berkeley. He teaches Jewish and European intellectual history at Oberlin College. His essay "Shades of Frost: a Hidden Source for Nabokov’s Pale Fire" first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. His first book, Judaism, Heresy and Philosophy: the Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

Suellen Stringer-Hye

Nabokov scholar and fan, Suellen Stringer-Hye is a computer specialist at the Vanderbilt University Libraries where, among many other things, she designs web pages. She has written on "Nabokov and Popular Culture," "Nabokov and Melville," and Ada. She is also the creator and compiler of "VN Collations," a regular column on NABOKV-L of references to Nabokov from the online and print popular presses. Additionally, she edits the CoLOlations web page on Zembla. In 1996, she conducted an online interview with Stephen Schiff, screenwriter for Adrian Lyne's' film interpretation of Lolita, also published in Zembla. More recently, she interviewed Stacy Schiff, author of the new biography of Véra Nabokov. Other research interests include Pierre Bernard and the history of the Clarkstown Country Club of South Nyack, New York.

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, who teaches English at Holy Cross College, is a former president of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society. Her contribution to Zembla--an essay entitled "Executing Sentences in Lolita and the Law," which first appeared in Punishment, Politics, and Culture (Elsevier, 2004)--was produced during a 2002 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Faculty Seminar. Other recent publications include "Looking at Harlequins: Nabokov, the 'World of Art,' and the Ballets Russes," in Nabokov's World, Vol. 2: Reading Nabokov (Palgrave, 2002); "'Ballet Attitudes': Nabokov's Lolita and Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty," reprinted in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A Casebook (Oxford, 2002); "The Enchanter and the Beauties of Sleeping," in Nabokov at Cornell (Cornell University Press, 2003); and "'By Some Sleight of Land': How Nabokov Rewrote America," in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. Sweeney also studies the influence of popular narrative forms--mysteries, romances, ghost stories, folktales--on modernist and postmodernist fiction, and served as coeditor of Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women (State University of New York Press, 1993) and Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). She is now working on fairy-tale allusions in Nabokov's fictions about pedophilia.

Leona Toker

Leona Toker is Professor in the English Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and, currently, member of the Committee for Higher Education. She is the author of Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989), Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (1993), Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000) and articles on English, American, and Russian writers. She is the editor of Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (1994) and co-editor of Rereading Texts / Rethinking Critical Presuppositions: Essays in Honour of H.M. Daleski (1996). At present she is Editor of Partial Answers: A Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, a semiannual refereed academic periodical sponsored by the School of Literatures of the Hebrew University. Her contributions to Zembla are an essay on Richard Rorty's reading of Nabokov (which originally appeared in Nabokov Studies #1), and a chapter from Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures on Mary.

Gerard de Vries

Gerard de Vries has been a reader of Nabokov's works for several decades. In addition to many essays published in Dutch literary journals on art and literature, he has published articles in English-language academic journals on Nabokov. He is co-author of Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting (Amsterdam 2006, by Gerard de Vries and D. Barton Johnson, with an essay by Liana Ashenden). His article "Nabokov's Pale Fire, Its Structure and the Last Works of J.S.Bach" was published in Cycnos as part of the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Nabokov, held in Nice in June 2006. His contributions to Zembla are a report on a trip to Domaine de Beaulieu, an estate near Solliès-Pont, France, where Nabokov spent several weeks in 1923, and an article on echoes of the Romantic Movement in Pale Fire.

Tadashi Wakashima

Tadashi Wakashima was born in 1952 in Kyoto, Japan, where, apart from several years spent teaching at a university in Kobe, he has lived ever since. A specialist of Joyce and Nabokov, he is Professor of English at Kyoto University. He has published four books ("An Astigmatic Reader's" Series) as well as numerous essays and articles on Joyce, Nabokov and other modern and contemporary writers. He has translated Lolita, The Defense, and co-translated The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, Transparent Things, and The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov into Japanese. His other translations include works by Richard Powers (Galatea 2.2), Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Holy Smoke), Robert Irwin (The Arabian Nightmare), as well as by Thomas M. Disch, Samuel R. Delany, Theodore Sturgeon, John Mortimer, Peter Straub, and others. He is a founding member and organizing director of the Nabokov Society of Japan and chairs the Kyoto Reading Circle. He is an International Master in Solving Chess Problems (as granted by the World Chess Federation). A selection of his chess problems and articles (in Japanese) are available on his personal website. His contribution to Zembla is an article on Lolita based on his experience of translating the novel into Japanese.

Brian Walter

Brian Walter has been a Lecturer in English and Film Studies at Washington University since 1998 and will become Assistant Professor of English at the St. Louis College of Pharmacy as of fall 2007. He completed his dissertation, “Nabokov and the Art of Reading,” at Washington University in 1995, and his scholarly work on Nabokov has appeared in (among others) Boulevard, Nabokov Studies, and Essays in Literature. He has also chaired sessions and/or presented papers on Nabokov at (among others) the MLA, American Literature Association, and Twentieth Century Literature conferences. His contribution to Zembla is an article on Pale Fire.

Dieter E. Zimmer

Dieter E. Zimmer was born 1934 in Berlin. In 1950 he came to Evanston, Illinois as an exchange high school student. Later he studied German and English literature, mainly at the Freie Universität, Berlin. In 1957 he earned an M.A. from Northwestern University, after which he taught languages in France and Switzerland for two years. Since 1959 Zimmer has been on the staff of the German weekly Die Zeit (Hamburg), until 1977 in the cultural section, where his focus was literature; since then he has served mainly as a science writer specializing in psychology, biology, psychiatry, linguistics, anthropology and, most recently, in matters concerning computers and language. Zimmer has published more than a dozen books on these subjects, four of them on language (evolution, acquisition and pragmatics), as well as a volume of poetry. Like Nabokov, Zimmer is an avowed enemy of Freudianism and wrote a controversial book on it entitled Tiefenschwindel (Rowohlt, 1986).

One of Zimmer's first assignments at Die Zeit in 1959 was to review the German edition of Lolita. His article came to the attention of Nabokov, who asked his German publisher and later Montreux friend Heinz Ledig-Rowohlt if he would try to recruit Zimmer as a translator for his works. The recruitment was successful, and resulted in Das wahre Leben des Sebastian Knight in 1960 and a number of other Nabokov works in German: Bend Sinister, Invitation to a Beheading, Speak, Memory (both versions), The Eye, The Enchanter, Transparent Things, Pnin and the majority of VN's short stories. The latest translation, of Lolita: A Screenplay is out due early in 1999. In 1963/64 Zimmer compiled the first Nabokov bibliography, mainly as an aid for Rowohlt, who had set out to publish a number of Nabokov's books. In 1996/98 Zimmer wrote and published A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths, excerpts of which are available in Zembla. Since 1989 he has been the sole editor of Rowohlt's uniform set of Nabokov's complete works in German, with all the translations revised and some of the volumes annotated. Of the twenty-five volumes of the set, sixteen will be out by 1999. The set includes are several world premieres: the first complete collection of Nabokov's stories in chronological order, the only complete edition of the Nabokov-Wilson letters, the first translation of Camera obskura along with Laughter in the Dark, and the first unabridged edition of the Lolita screenplay. In 1996 Zimmer received the prestigious Helmut M. Braem award for his Nabokov translations. Over the years, he has also translated works by James Joyce, Nathanael West, Edward Gorey, Ambrose Bierce, Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf, and Gabriel García Marquez.

In addition to excerpts from his Guide to Butterflies and Moths, Zimmer has contributed significantly to Zembla, including the basis of the extensive online Nabokov Criticism bibliography and a list of Nabokov's Homes and Haunts.