In 2012, Brian Boyd hosted a conference in Auckland. The participants were assigned the task of considering Nabokov “upside down, from a fresh perspective but without losing their balance” (1).

Most of the papers in this resulting, consistently-stimulating volume might be called horizontal, or, in keeping with the conference's geographical metaphor, latitudinal. Rather than burrow down and provide a new interpretation of a well-known text, the authors identify hitherto neglected topics running across much or even all of Nabokov's work. They ensure that we will pay attention to these themes in the future. Thus, Stephen Blackwell explores Nabokov's fascination with trees, “temporally, spatially, ecologically and imaginatively rich objects” (32) that often signal a moment of particular intensity, places where the reader is often rewarded by stopping to look and starting to climb. Susan Sweeney takes as her theme Nabokov's use of movement and shows us how Nabokov's prose might be seen as fundamentally choreographic or meta-choreographic, for Nabokov induces readers to think—and I would add—read, in new directions, not only left to right but diagonally and backwards, linking words in ways dictated by proximity rather than syntax. Paul Grant insists on a place in Nabokov's fiction for broad humor that does not demand “excessive amounts of cogitation” (59). (The problem here is that Nabokov is rarely that funny, and moments of broad humor are often calculated to mask more profound points.) A profound question raised by a reading of Grant is whether Nabokov's body humor may be attributed to a life-affirming delight in the physical or to an underlying disgust with flesh.

Lara Delage-Toriel surveys the place of food in Nabokov's world, noting that chefs are almost never artists there: “As an aristocrat, Nabokov is more interested in the end result, served in the dining room, than in the menial process of transformation” (79). She makes the wonderful observation that the stewed pears served to the lodgers in Mary nod to Le Père Goriot, where the same dish, consumed by Rastignac, ironically mocks his dreams of triumph and ascent. (In this respect, the pears are like the roll rejected by Levin but gnawed on fifty years later by Margot in Laughter in the Dark; in Nabokov's world, unappetizing food can keep for a long time). Monica Manolescu discovers a productive topic in Nabokov's treatment of orality, showing how in so many ways “the art of [his] writing is haunted by speech” (89). “Nabokov,” she writes, “was very much interested in reproducing the spontaneity and freedom of orality” (89). That spontaneity was repressed in his public performances and his fiction, but often in a way that—stylistically and ethically—draws attention to its absence.

For all Nabokov's delight in the power of memory, Julian Connolly directs our attention to a group of pathological rememberers who pursue a physical recovery of the past rather than its merely mental resurrection. Seen from this perspective, the counter-example of Mary’s Ganin, who is “enriched by his creative mnemonic exercise, not overwhelmed by it” (124), emerges as a more positive figure than some readers have realized. (In mythological terms, this essay is a productive meditation on the risks of playing Orpheus, or of confusing Fedorov with Proust.) Dana Dragunoiu argues for the importance of courtesy in Nabokov's fiction; courtesy is “an intrinsic good, … a set of behaviors that speaks for itself and serves its own ends” (147). Courtesy, she writes, is “not just a moral act, but an artistic, one, too” (147), for, like art, it often serves no useful purpose.

Two papers make important contributions to our understanding of Nabokov's poetry. Stanislav Shvabrin points out that although Nabokov was a traditionalist in terms of poetic form, spurning the dolnik in his Russian verse, Nabokov did use what he called “pausative” meter (173) in his path-breaking translations of Heinrich Heine and Paul Verlaine. R.S. Gwynn claims that “Pale Fire” deserves “a place of honor as one of the finest long poems ever written by an American” (221). Even readers who do not share this sunny assessment will find interesting Gwynn's claim that Yvor Winters, whom Nabokov met at Stanford in the summer of 1941, made such a favorable impression that Nabokov used his verse as the model for John Shade's.

Robert Alter's contribution—“Nabokov for Those Who Hate Him”—explores the strange position of the narrator in Pnin, who oscillates between serving as the hero's “chief mocker” and “helping us perceive [Pnin's] essential human dignity” (208); the slippages in the narrator's persona contribute to the rich complexity of the novel. David Rampton reads closely Nabokov's pre-war French essay, “Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible,” treating it as a kind of heuristic experiment, born of tensions created by “wistful vacillations” that occurred as Nabokov gave in to temptation and conducted a dialogue about poetic principles with himself. Naomi Olson, Shun'ichiro Akikusa, and Yannicke Chupin, respectively, contribute pieces on Nabokov's interest in out-of-body experiences, his mediated connection to Japanese literature, and the transformation of Humbert into Hubert in The Original of Laura.

A heated moment at the conference seems to have been the discussion of Galya Diment's paper on Nabokov's generally disparaging, even contemptuous treatment of servants. The exception, she claims, are two servants in Pnin: Pnin's friends’ housekeeper, Praskovia, and Desdemona, “the colored charwoman,” who “happened to glimpse Pnin basking in the unearthly lilac light of his sun lamp, wearing nothing but shorts, dark glasses, and a dazzling Greek-Catholic cross on his broad chest, and insisted thereafter that he was a saint” (138). Diment finds this an ironic and poignant portrayal: “The irony begins with her name, probably given by her parents out of respect for a fictional white woman who fell in love with a black man—and in that there is much poignancy as well. The poignancy swells when we realize that it was that kind of intimate faith that gave African Americans strength to survive hardships, poverty and discrimination” (139). Boyd, who discusses the papers not only in his introduction but also in a spirited afterword—appropriate enough since in Nabokov “it is the commentator who has the last word” (Pale Fire, 1989, 29)—objects that Diment's class-conscious approach doesn't take into account all the failings of non-servants in Nabokov's world, and he reminds her of Sebastian Knight's dictum: “A person who fails to notice a taxi-driver's hare-lip because he is in a hurry to get somewhere, is to me a monomaniac” (255). Diment has a point in that Nabokov's narrators, at least, often treat servants badly; moreover, a narrator's love of specific detail in an otherwise flat character does not amount to an appreciation of the servant's humanity. But Diment does not take into account the issue at the heart of Alter's contribution: the filter of Pnin’s narrator. In his appreciation of Praskovia, that “sixty-year-old woman of the people” (138), Pnin’s narrator is falling for the nostalgic kitsch to which many of Pnin's Russian colleagues are deplorably inclined. And “Desdemona” may well be the narrator's own little joke—like his “Anna Karamazov” or “John Head,” and a racist one, at that, rather than a name given by “actual” parents. (He is a name-caller in both senses of the term). That the cleaning lady calls Pnin a saint as he soaks in that “unearthly lilac light of the sun lamp” (Pnin, 40)—a color linked in Nabokov's mind to his own persona (siren΄/Sirin)—reflects not so much on the cleaning lady in particular as it participates in Nabokov's beloved technique of freighting utterances by all sorts of characters with hidden symbolic baggage; this is Pnin's comic parallel to Fyodor's sunbathing in the Grunewald.

Genuinely paradigm-setting, Marijeta Bozovic's chapter offers a new way to appreciate two of Nabokov's more problematic works. She suggests that the brilliantly lumpy Onegin Commentary and Ada be read as “forerunners of experimental transnational literature” (234). In both texts, Nabokov moves Pushkin and Russian literature from the margins of European literature to its shared center, constructing a transnational canon in which Russian, French, and English literature are equals. Bozovic prompts us to focus less on what Ada, in particular, means than in what it does. In so doing, she transforms Nabokov from a lone traditionalist standing firm against the vulgar avant-garde into a transnational visionary with acolytes he never knew he would have. This counts, I think, as a vertical reading, though paradoxically it may flatten Ada as a novel, if that novel's virtues no longer have to depend on the sometimes cloying pleasures of close reading. Along with her co-editor and co-authors, Bozovic has helped produce a volume that will become something of a transnational canon in and of itself, taking Nabokovians in all sorts of directions for years to come.