Bryan Karetnyk

Supervisor: Dr Maria Rubins, Professor Pamela Davidson

Present status: PhD candidate

Working title of thesis: Nabokov in Context: His Literary Origins in Russia Abroad

Research: My research focuses on the artistic development of Vladimir Nabokov throughout his formative years as a writer, during his period of European emigration. The project aims to situate Nabokov’s oeuvre within the broader literary, social, political and philosophical discourses of the first wave of Russian emigration in Western Europe, and to explore the various sources and influences that fundamentally shaped his course as a writer in terms of both aesthetics and thematics. In so doing, my research aims not only to deepen our understanding of this major twentieth-century writer, but also to go some way towards addressing the prevailing disciplinary gap between Nabokov studies and émigré studies.