Nabokov Under Glass: A Centennial Exhibition

From April 23, 1999 through August 21, 1999
Edna Barnes Salomon Room (Third Floor)
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018-2788 (directions)

See related Online Exhibition.

The most elusive of novelists and men, there sometimes seem to be at least as many Nabokovs as there are readers of his work, or at least twice as many Nabokovs as there are works by him. Yet behind all the masks, there is still only one man, whom the writer once called the "anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me." To celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth (April 23, 1899), this exhibition unveils that impersonation by focusing on the artifacts of Nabokov's artifices, through books, manuscripts, drawings, letters, and notes from the Nabokov archives once assembled atop the Hotel Palace in Montreux, Switzerland, and since 1991 part of The New York Public Library's Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. The exhibition offers a chronological look at Nabokov's career, ranging from the earliest poems and metrical experiments of his late teens to the butterfly drawings and texts of his later years.

Included are the holograph index cards and typescripts for his last three novels (Ada, Transparent Things, and Look at the Harlequins!), index cards and notes for his majestic memoir Speak, Memory, and notes and typescripts for the English translations of many of his earlier Russian novels. The manuscripts for his own translation of Lolita into Russian and his screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaptation of are also included, as are manuscripts from his lectures as a teacher at Wellesley and Cornell, and his heavily annotated copies of Kafka's Metamorphoses and Joyce's Ulysses, as well as other books from his library.

Press Release