I’ve posted the fifth version of the update to the draft pages of Lolita / Лолита. There are 59 English and Russian editions in this version (eventually there will be more than 80), published from 1955 through 2000. Of interest are English language editions published in China (A28.44 and A28.58) and Korea (A28.48), a large print edition (A28.47), and two editions of The Annotated Lolita with corrections (A28.40 and A28.43).
Here’s a new update to the draft pages of Lolita / Лолита. So far there are 37 editions in English and Nabokov’s Russian translation, published from 1955 through 1991. Included this time are the first 15 editions of Nabokov’s Russian translation which were published in Russia (the first one by Izvestia, 1989) and two editions with corrections (Vintage, 1989, and The Annotated Lolita, Vintage, 1991).
I’ve added a new update to the draft pages of Lolita / Лолита. Included are the first nineteen editions in English and Nabokov’s Russian translation, from 1955 through 1987. I’ve added the U.S. and British The Annotated Lolita (with Alfred Appel, Jr.’s supplementary material, corrections, and quotations from Nabokov), two Ardis Russian editions (reproduced from the 1967 Phaedra edition with its errors), and five book club editions.
I’ve updated the new draft pages of Lolita / Лолита to include the first eight editions, from 1955 through 1969. I’ve added the first wrappers editions from Fawcett (US, 1959) and Corgi (Britain, 1961), the long run of paperback printings from Putnam’s/Berkley (US, 1966–1987 and possibly later), and the first edition of Nabokov’s Russian translation, from Phaedra (US, 1967).
And so we reach the end of the A-items, for now, with Lolita / Лолита. There are dozens of editions and hundreds of printings in English and Nabokov’s own translation into Russian. Here I start out with only the first three editions, or A-items: The Paris Olympia Press edition of 1955, the American Putnam edition of 1958, and the British Weidenfeld & Nicolson edition of 1959. I will add more editions next week. Lolita is A28 in the 1986 bibliography.
The pdf of the draft pages is not acting sanely in Firefox and I am working on the problem. It is displaying properly in Safari and Chrome. I don’t know if it behaves in Internet Explorer and other browsers.
I just noticed that my blog’s spam filter was overly aggressive on Robert Nelson’s recent comment on my Sebastian Knight draft pages and tried to trash it. Fortunately I was able to snatch it back and post it. But I may have missed other comments. Please let me know if the despammer did you wrong by sending an email to blog@vnbiblio.com.
Tags: novel
I am vacationing on Mt. Desert Island for the next two weeks and won’t be able to post the next draft pages until I return. That next set will be very complex (dozens of editions), very long (hundreds of printings), and very rich (from many countries in the two languages Nabokov wrote and translated it in). For these reasons, I will post A28 Lolita (for it is her of course) in installments over several weeks when I return.
Sprinting on to the next set of draft pages for the revised and updated bibliography: Russische Lieder [Russian Songs], the notes on and translations of a dozen Russian songs sung by Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, on a recording issued by MPS Records in 1974. This item did not appear in the 1986 bibliography.
Tags: notes, recording, songs, translations
Rounding the turn and moving on to the next set of draft pages for the revised and updated bibliography: Selected Poems, a collection of 89 poems Nabokov wrote, beginning in 1914, in Russian (some translated by Nabokov, some by his son Dmitri) and in English. Edited and introduced by Thomas Karshan, it was published by Knopf in the U.S. and Penguin in Britain in 2012. It did not appear in the 1986 bibliography.
And so, the next set of draft pages for the revised and updated bibliography: The Original of Laura, Nabokov’s final piece of writing, his uncompleted novel. Before he died in 1977 he told his wife that if he couldn’t finish it he wanted her to destroy it. She wasn’t able to before she died in 1991. Nor was his son, Dmitri who finally, in 2008 after much thought, announced that he would publish it. It was issued simultaneously in the U.S. by Knopf and in Britain by Penguin in November 2009 to much fanfare. But the novel’s semi-formed state left many critics bewildered. They gave the book generally poor reviews. It did not appear in the 1986 bibliography.
Tags: novel
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