Irene Masing-Delic

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Will communism abolish death? -- this is a question that was often asked in the USSR of the 1920s. "There will come a time when they will cure death as we now cure the flu, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. And it will not be a fairy-tale, like Christ's resurrection of Lazarus, but reality offered by science -- wrote the journal "Science and Religion" i...

This article discusses the genre of KQK as a mixture of the fantastic and realistic in the Hoffmannian tradition of Romantic ambiguity. Specifically, it demonstrates Nabokov’s engagement with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale “The Sandman” (“Der Sandmann,” 1816). Like Nathanael of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story, the “Knave” of Nabokov’s novel King, Queen, Knave...

This essay examines the protagonist of Nabokov’s 1930 novel The Defense as a character who has much in common with Gogol’s Bashmachkin from “The Overcoat” (1842). Both seek refuge from “real” life in their respective art: calligraphy in Bashmachkin’s case, and chess in Luzhin’s. The two protagonists’ fascination with abstract patterns and disintere...

A tireless champion of gender equality, Kollontai endorsed “free love” but urged women not to make romance the “main substance” of their lives. Like men, women should seek self‐fulfillment. Kollontai herself subordinated her emotions to the demands of several careers – political journalist and fiction writer, revolutionary activist and oppositionis...

Nabokov’s novel Glory (Podvig, 1932) was often viewed as a “regression” to traditional novel writing and, therefore, perceived as untypical for the innovative modernist Nabokov (Sirin). More recently there have been critical voices reading the novel as marked by Silver Age aesthetics, not least for its fantasy and fairytale elements and its inclusi...

Nabokov scholarship has recently paid considerable attention to the Orpheus and Eurydice motifs in Nabokovʼs work. This paper argues that the motifs form an all-pervasive subtext, especially in the Russian period. When examining Eurydiceʼs function in the constellation “Orpheus and Eurydice”, one sees that many female characters in Nabokovʼs fictio...

In his book on Mikhail Zoshchenko, Dm. Moldavskii asserts that Zoshchenko was a writer "who traversed the path from the prose of Nikolai Gogol to the prose of Aleksandr Pushkin."1 It would be more accurate to say that Zoshchenko was a writer who actively developed Soviet literary mythmaking about how the "life-loving" and "courageous" Pushkin was t...