OCH Publications > Oregon Humanities table of contents
Oregon Humanities is a journal of ideas and perspectives published twice a year by the Oregon Council for the Humanities. Each issue includes essays and articles that explore a particular theme from a variety of perspectives, broadening the ways in which readers think about a subject and providing a basis for further thoughtful discussion.
Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007
- Kathleen Holt
- EDITOR
- Jennifer Viviano
- GRAPHIC DESIGN
- Leigh van der Werff
- PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
- Allison Dubinsky
- COPY EDITOR
- Editorial Advisory Board
- Tom Booth
- Brian Doyle
- Debra Gwartney
- Julia Heydon
- Marianne Keddington-Lang
- Guy Maynard
- Win McCormack
- Camela Raymond
- Kate Sage
- Linny Stovall
- Rich Wandschneider
- Curt Yehnert
Oregon Humanities, a journal of ideas and perspectives about the humanities, is published biannually by the Oregon Council for the Humanities, 812 SW Washington Street, Suite 225, Portland, Oregon 97205.
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Secret Lives: Vladimir Nabokov
When Lev Grossman, book critic at Time magazine, published a piece about Vladimir Nabokov's relationship with his gay brother, Sergei, in the online magazine Salon, the article set off a flurry of debate about whether the author of Lolita was in fact homophobic.
Nabokov is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest novelists. His liberal family enjoyed a life of enormous privilege before the Russian Revolution. When the family became emigres, Vladimir and his younger brother, Sergei, both studied Russian and French at Cambridge, but there the similarities between the two ended. Vladimir was a consummate wordsmith and went on to marry Vera Slonim. The couple moved to Berlin and then Paris before emigrating to the United States in 1940, where Vladimir taught at Wellesley College and began to write novels in English. Sergei endured a terrible stutter and never found a true career, though he moved in artistic circles and eventually found a gratifying relationship. By 1945, while Vladimir was flirting shamelessly with the students at Wellesley College, Sergei was dying in Neuengamme, a concentration camp near Hamburg.
Many of Vladimir Nabokov's biographers as well as his own autobiography, Speak, Memory, suggest that Vladimir had little patience or sympathy for his younger brother. "Vladimir's tortured relationship with Sergei is one of the secret stories of an otherwise very public life, and Nabokov scholars are only now slowly coming to terms with the depths of Nabokov's prejudice," wrote Grossman in Salon. The Nabokov family issued a statement shortly after the article's publication, stating that Vladimir's relationship with Sergei was not the inspiration for his novels.
Whether, as Grossman's article suggests, Vladimir's inability to individuate completely from his brother is the reason for the negative representations of homosexual characters in Nabokov's novels will continue to be a source of debate. "Nabokov's homophobia is in fact one of the dirty little secrets of twentieth-century literature," Grossman writes, "on a par with T. S. Eliot's anti-Semitism."
--Mary Rechner
Published in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.
© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities