F ascination with fl ora and fauna usually starts early in life as an all-encompassing childhood pastime. Growing up in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, I developed an affi nity for natural history as a child, inspired by famous television naturalists, such as Jacques Cousteau and Bernhard Grzimek, as well as by role models closer to home. As a child, it seemed quite natural to observe, experime...

Translation is recognised as an act of culture-specific communication. A translator is the ‘first reader’ of the other culture as is shown in the foreign language text and, consequently, has to present the other in a primary process. For him learning to translate means ‘learning to read’, i.e. to produce meanings which are acceptable for the cultural community the reader belongs to. Each transl...

Transcontinental dispersals by organisms usually represent improbable events that constitute a major challenge for biogeographers. By integrating molecular phylogeny, historical biogeography and palaeoecology, we test a bold hypothesis proposed by Vladimir Nabokov regarding the origin of Neotropical Polyommatus blue butterflies, and show that Beringia has served as a biological corridor for the...

T he famous Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov once described writing as " a torture and a pastime " and contrasted it to " a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of lepidoptera in a great museum " [1]. For six years before moving to Cornell University as a professor of Russian literature, Nabokov worked as a research fellow at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, where he specialize...

The literary works of Vladimir Nabokov are often discussed in terms intertextuality, since the writer is a known master games and puzzles with numerous allusions, direct or hidden (mis)quotations, dialogues, names, themes, echoing multilingual world literature. concept rhizome appears as productive way interpreting architecture Nabokov’s (Strelnikova 2018). As described by Deleuze Guattari (198...

In his paper "Nabokov and World Literature" Charles Stanley Ross thinks through the relationship between comparative literature and cultural studies by considering the absence of Nabokov's work in The Norton Anthology of World Literature. The problem seems to be that Nabokov's works are not susceptible to the kind of varying interpretations favored by the Norton's editors, although in practice,...

Zusammenfassung Die beiden im Exil entstandenen Romane „The Real Life of Sebastian Knight“ (1941) von Vladimir Nabokov und „Doktor Faustus“ (1947) Thomas Mann sind zwei fiktionale Texte über das Schreiben nicht-fiktionaler Künstler-Biographien. Da die fiktiven Biographen-Figuren selbst keine Künstler sind, wird in Romanen der Blick außen auf künstlerische Kreativität dargestellt. Auf Werkebene ...