Please mark your calendars for the first installment of our Comparative Literature works-in-progress series, What Matters to Me!

Our fall term speaker is Jenifer Presto (COLT/REEES). Professor Presto will present her talk, “Afterglow: Nabokov, Pompeii, and the Atomic Age” on Friday, November 1, at 4 p.m. in 111 Lillis Hall.

Of “Afterglow,” Jenifer Presto writes:

“Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of ‘thaw’ in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on leave me supremely indifferent,” Vladimir Nabokov famously proclaimed in a 1963 interview. Based on this statement, we might assume that he studiously avoided addressing the threat of nuclear catastrophe that hung over the Cold War period—this despite the scattered references to U.S. and Soviet nuclear testing that can be found in Pnin (1957) and, especially, in Pale Fire (1962), which was completed shortly after the Soviets detonated the Tsar Bomba on the Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya (or Nova Zembla) in the fall of 1961. This talk argues, however, that Nabokov permits himself to entertain the possibility of the nuclear Armageddon in his late speculative novel, Ada, or Ardor (1969), which is set on a fictional planet known as Antiterra and is obsessed with the erotic culture of the ancient city of Pompeii. Destroyed by a volcanic eruption deemed even more powerful than the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pompeii is implicitly associated by Nabokov with the feared nuclear Holocaust, just as it would be for other late twentieth-century writers and thinkers such as Primo Levi and Jacques Derrida. Disinclined, though, to make disaster his main theme, and preferring to push it to the margins of his text, Nabokov attempts in Ada to focus on the erotic pleasures of Pompeii before the infamous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. that put an end to life in the provincial Roman city. Despite Nabokov’s attempts to stave off catastrophe, Ada becomes in the end a novel about the last days of Pompeii, allowing him to give voice to what Derrida would term the “fabulously textual” nature of the nuclear epoch.