SOURCE: “Official and Unofficial Responses to Nabokov in the Soviet Union,” in The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov: Essay Studies, Reminiscences, and Stories from The Cornell Nabokov Festival,, edited by George Gibian and Steven Jan Parker, Center for International Studies, Committee on Soviet Studies, Cornell University, 1984, pp. 99-117.

In the following essay, Paperno and Hagopian detail the treatment of Nabokov's work in the Soviet Union.

It is perhaps not entirely whimsical to observe that cultural phenomena in the Soviet Union may be divided into three periods: before Stalin, under Stalin, and after Stalin. Concomitantly, Soviet responses to Nabokov may be designated as: aggressive silence, total silence, and cautious silence. Official responses are, of course, a matter of public record and our discussion of that issue will be in terms of references to Nabokov in the Soviet press. However, our discussion of the unofficial status of Nabokov in the Soviet...