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Sigi Jöttkandt's The Nabokov Effect: Reading in the Endgame attends to the ‘lettrocalamity’ that occurs when literature and cinema collide in Vladimir Nabokov’s work. Jöttkandt suspends the long-held critical investment in Nabokov’s authorial control to focus on another principle of representational agency making incursions into his books. Tracing the subterranean network of cross-lingual puns, homophonies, and technical overflows of writing to a cinaesthetic signature system, Jöttkandt recasts the vexed question of Nabokov’s relation to psychoanalysis. A pioneer of too-close reading, Nabokov offers himself, Jöttkandt argues, as the tipping point of perceptual and epistemological systems that are in the process of devouring themselves. The ensuing ‘Nabokov effect’ is both an assault on teleological models, and an opening onto other forms of reading and listening, which Jöttkandt argues was always latent in psychoanalysis. In this book, Nabokov emerges as the writer for humanity’s endgame, architect of a post- interpretive complex that opens up broader questions concerning our ability to read him or, indeed any writer, today.

The discussions on an ethics of literature and a specifically aesthetic form of justice make it clear: the question of the aesthetic and ethical valuation and evaluation of literature has recently moved back into the centre of interest in the humanities and cultural studies. This volume brings together contributions on the themes of crime/punishment, penance/mercy or virtue/reward.

Summary: Special Issue of Arts: "Slavic and Eastern-European Visuality: Modernity and Tradition" is focused on researching interactions of art and literature, of philosophy and visual poetry, and generally on theoretical aspects of cultural analysis.

This collection of essays on Turgenev, Goncharov, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Blok, Briusov, Gor’kii, Pasternak and Nabokov represents diverse voices but is also unified. One invariant is the recurring distinction between “culture” and “civilization” and the vision of Russia as the bearer of culture because it is “barbaric.” Another stance advocates the synthesis of “sense and sensibility” and the vision of “Apollo” and “Dionysus” creating a “civilized culture” together. Those voices that delight in the artificiality of civilization are complemented by those apprehensive of the dangers inherent in barbarism. This collection thus adds new perspectives to the much-debated opposition of vital Russia and a declining West, offering novel interpretations of classics from Oblomov to Lolita and The Idiot to Doctor Zhivago.