Vladimir Nabokov once claimed to sum up the entirety of his “political creed” in a three-fold formula: “Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art.” Indeed, his works and pronouncements demonstrate a lifelong opposition to tyrants, authoritarian regimes, censorship, and suppression. For Nabokov, who escaped the effects of the Russian Revolution and wrote his oeuvre while exiled in the West, liberal democracy is “humanity at its best” because it most perfectly strikes “the subtle balance between the boundless privileges of every individual and the strictly equal rights of all men.” Nabokov made such overt declarations in essays and interviews, but his anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy politics are also deeply present in his literary works, where a subtle political engagement counters tyranny in its many forms. Nevertheless, published scholarship has not yet fully explored the rich implications of the political undercurrents in his fiction.

This panel will consider several diverse ways in which Nabokov, in his fictive art, centers this virtue of “freedom” and expresses his grudge against tyranny. Each of our three panelists will address Nabokov’s strong anti-authoritarian themes of freedom and emancipation through innovative readings demonstrating the links between the author’s political ideals and his more spiritual conceptions of timelessness, creative imagination, and transcendence.

In his presentation “Emancipation’s Double Edge: Fantasy, Tyranny, and Narrative Form in Nabokov,” Abubaker Zahoor will examine how “fictional invention constitutes Nabokov’s most consistent and most rigorously theorized riposte to tyranny.” At the same time, Zahoor’s treatment will demonstrate, with further sophistication, Nabokov’s evolving considerations of personal freedom by performing a comparative treatment of two of Nabokov’s most important novels: Invitation to a Beheading (1935) and Pale Fire (1962). “Where Invitation to a Beheading presents Cincinnatus’s imaginative freedom as unambiguously heroic and inviolable,” Zahoor argues, “Pale Fire subjects the same emancipatory logic to a corrosive self-critique: Kinbote’s Zemblan fantasy liberates its creator only by colonizing, distorting, and ultimately displacing John Shade’s poem, a corrosion literalized in the very architecture of the novel.” “Read together,” Zahoor proposes, “the two works map the full double edge of Nabokov’s faith in [...] freedom,” illustrating not only Nabokov’s staunch resistance to tyranny but also the “hidden cost” when one individual’s freedom impinges upon another’s.

With a title drawn from the New Testament (Galatians 5:13), Erik Eklund’s presentation, “‘For you were called to freedom’: Religion and Authoritarianism in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister,” will consider how Nabokov’s most overtly anti-authoritarian novel “stages a confrontation between religion and politics.” By examining “the intersection of Byzantine hagiography, literary reflexivity, and fascist ideology” in the 1947 novel, Eklund aims to unpack how Christian notions of liberty and freedom inform—and complicate—Nabokov’s political dedication to liberal democracy, while demonstrating that “the author’s use of religious themes and imagery broadens [our] understanding of his anti-authoritarian commitments.” Ultimately, Eklund’s presentation seeks to lay out “the conceptual possibilities and limitations that two-world cosmologies[...] present for political theodicies” by addressing, among other matters, whether the sufferings and torments inflicted by brutal regimes (fictional or real-world) do not call into question certain failures of “the Otherworld” to defend the righteous and protect the innocent.

In our third and final presentation, “Vladimir Nabokov and the Politics of Timelessness,” Hanna Miles will consider “Nabokovian timelessness as a form of resistance against authoritarian regimes.” Miles frames her argument by citing Nabokov’s claim in Speak, Memory that “The prison of time is spherical and without exits.” And yet, as Miles further notes, “Nabokov did find a way of escaping this ‘prison,’ [by] rejecting the spatialized sphere of ‘clock time’ in favor of an intuitive, transcendent, and creative form of temporality, unbound by the dictates of space and linearity.” By examining temporal motifs in such novels as Mary and Lolita, Miles aims to demonstrate “a clear correspondence between clock time and fascism,” proposing that, by contrast, “Nabokov’s ‘free world of timelessness,’ exemplified within Speak, Memory, emerges as a locus of individual freedom in the face of political and ideological tyranny.”

As a “spiritual” sequel to the 2018 IVNS-MLA panel “Nabokov versus Tyrants”—constructed under similar political circumstances nearly a decade ago—this new panel was organized to address the crisis of unvarnished authoritarianism in the US (and beyond) that has only grown more severely acute, directly threatening the freedoms Nabokov held to be inviolable.

While our speakers shall, therefore, circumambulate certain shared themes, their approaches, backgrounds, and respective fields of study (fiction writing, theology, trauma studies) represent a diversity of viewpoints. Each presentation will be limited to eighteen minutes, assuring that 15+ minutes for questions and answers will be reserved.