With the encouragement of the “Motherlode” blog by Lisa Belkin in The New York Times on 20 Feb 2009 and her link to the website of BJ Fogg, Director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, at facebookforparents.org, I joined Facebook in early March.

It was odd that joining the social network provoked so much anxiety in me. I’ve been emailing since the 80s and registered my first domain in 1998. But I wasn’t comfortable joining this network originally created for college students. (Facebook became wide open in 2006 and anyone with an email address can join it.) However I faced down my fears and signed up. It has its moments. I “friended” my 24-year-old daughter, a bunch of nephews and nieces, my brother-in-law, and even my wife. At first my daughter found it very weird friending her father. But I think that she has now accepted my tentative step into her world.

Despair, unknown

To get to the point: I immediately checked out the VN groups on Facebook. I found 13 with memberships from one (“Nabokov Nerds”) to 1134 (“Nabokov Junkies”), and one in French, and one in Turkish. They have membership lists, discussion boards, postings, photos, and even officers. (I wonder what they do?)

One, “Nabokov Türkiye”, has a photo of what looks like a book cover for Despair in English. Where was it from? The founder of that group wrote to me that he had picked it up from flickr.com. I hopped over there and joined that network. I asked the poster of the photo where the cover came from. A few hours later I noticed he had toggled the photo from public to private. No further word from him. Anyway, here’s what it looks like. Does anyone recognize it?