CANCELED - Maxim D. Shrayer on Pnin, Nabokov's Shoah Novel

CANCELED. We hope to invite Professor Shrayer back next year.

Join us for the latest in the Slavic Colloquium series, hosted by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

This lecture will investigate a number of Jewish-Russian and American literary, historical, and emotional sources for the principal characters and themes in Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov’s third American novel and one of the first American novels about Shoah memory. Specifically, Pnin’s beloved, Mira Belochkin, is linked with the Jewish-Russian poet and medievalist Raisa Blokh (1898-1943), who perished in the Shoah. The lecture will consider the reasons why Nabokov chose for the fictional Mira Belochkin to perish in Buchenwald — rather than in a camp where a historic Jewish-Russian woman deported from Western or Central Europe was likely to meet her death. The lecture will show that the creation of Nabokov’s novel was a testament not only to what Nabokov knew and did not know about the Shoah, but also to the American cultural context of his novel.

Maxim D. Shrayer, a translingual author, scholar, and translator, is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College. He also directs the Project on Russian and Eurasian Jewry at Harvard's Davis Center. Professor Shrayer has authored and edited over fifteen books of criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, among them the memoir Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story, the collection of novellas A Russian Immigrant, the Holocaust study I SAW IT, the double biography Bunin and Nabokov: A History of Rivalry, and the anthology Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature. His works have been translated into nine languages. Shrayer won a 2007 National Jewish Book Award, and in 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. For more information visit his website at www.shrayer.com.