1 For more on Nabokov’s translation of Onegin, see also Shvabrin’s article in this volume (editors’ note).

2 In Nabokov’s Foreword to Invitation to a Beheading he champions pedantry in relation to the novel’s translation into English: “My son proved to be a marvelously congenial translator, and it was settled between us that fidelity to one’s author comes first, no matter how bizarre the result. Vive le pédant, and down with the simpletons who think that all is well if the ‘spirit’ is rendered” (Nabokov 1959: 7).

3 See Anthony Uhlmann: “the problem posed for interpretation by Nabokov’s use of irony is something a reader becomes aware of in Nabokov’s published interviews as much as in his fiction. When you read or listen to interviews with Nabokov you are immediately struck by the tone of his comments, which seem to be both categorical and heavily ironic. Surely some of these comments are too outrageous to be taken seriously?” (Uhlmann 2011: 119).

4 John Updike applauded Nabokov’s bravura: “The translation itself, so laconic compared to the footnotes, with its breathtaking gaps, pages long, of omitted stanzas whose lines are eerily numbered as if they were there, ranks with Horace Gregory’s Catallus and Richmond Lattimore’s Iliad as superb, quirky, and definitive” (Updike 1964: 155). Of the gap in Chapter One, XXXIX, XL, XLI, Nabokov offers the following explanation: “It is not unthinkable that this gap is a fictitious one, with some musical value—the artifice of a wistful pause, the imitation of a missed heartbeat, the mirage of an emotional horizon, false asterisks of false suspense” (Nabokov in Pushkin 1964 II: 164). To which one might respond: thanks for clearing that one up.

5 Many critics have compared Nabokov’s Commentary to Onegin with the annotations of Kinbote. See, e.g., John Wain’s review of Nabokov’s Onegin and Clarence Brown’s splendid essay on the same. Brown sees the poem-and-commentary form as the “essential structure” of other novels like The Defense, The Gift and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Brown 1967: 205).

6 In response to Wilson’s review, Nabokov humorously highlighted the latter’s deficiencies in Russian: “As late as 1957, at one of our last meetings […] we both realized with amused dismay that, despite my frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian verse. Upon being challenged to read Evgeniy Onegin aloud, he started to perform with great gusto, garbling every second word, and turning Pushkin’s iambic line into a kind of spastic anapest with a lot of jaw-twisting haws and rather endearing little barks that utterly jumbled the rhythm and soon had us both in stitches” (Nabokov 1973: 248). Wilson responded by ridiculing Nabokov’s vocabulary: some of his words, Wilson said, “double me up with mirth [and cause] me to roll on the floor exsufflicate with cachinnation” (Wilson 1966: 92).

7 In his Foreword to Invitation to a Beheading Nabokov cites Orwell as an example of “popular purveyors of illustrated ideas and publicistic fiction” (Nabokov 1959: 7), and in his Introduction to Bend Sinister he calls him a “mediocre” writer of “clichés” (Nabokov 1973: 6).

8 Despite appreciating Nabokov’s humour, Rampton thinks that his judgments do not stand up to scrutiny: “Nabokov is always more amusing as a polemicist than he is convincing, especially when he is trying to make a case for his estimations of other writers” (Rampton 1984: 145).

9 From Nabokov’s introductory survey of Soviet literature, printed on the flyleaf of Lectures on Russian Literature.

10 Many critics miss the fact that Mortus is the pseudonym of a female critic, “a woman of middle age, the mother of a family, who in her youth had published excellent poems in the St. Petersburg review Apollo and who now lived modestly two steps from the grave of Marie Bashkirtsev, suffering from an incurable eye illness which endowed Mortus’ every line with a kind of tragic value” (Nabokov 1963: 181). Mortus’s ailment is as figurative as it is literal, and as significant as her surname: she cannot see well enough to recognise what Fyodor has accomplished, so she is dead to his talent.

11 In Pale Fire Sybil Shade translates Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” into French, but Kinbote is unimpressed: “one deplores the superfluous ejaculation in the second line introduced there only to coagulate the caesura” (Nabokov 1962: 240-241).