66039X1 Bollingen Series. Princeton University Press, Princeton: 1969. 182 pages. Softcover. Reading copy. To his translation of and commentary on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Vladimir Nabokov appended two entertaining tracts related in very different ways to the main theme. Because of their interest to literary students and scholars, poets, historians, Slavicists, and above all to connoisseurs of Nabokoviana, they are issued together in this paperback edition with indexes. Notes on Prosody is a "splendid 100-page essay on the iambic tetrameter in English and in Russian which not only illuminates Pushkin for the English reader as no one has done before, but also (scandalous that it should be so fills a gap in our understanding of English poets" (Donald Davie, Manchester Guardian Weekly. In Notes on Prosody, "Nabokov's presuppositions and definitions place the reader at his mercy (exactly where he wants you" (R. W. Simmons, Books Abroad. Abram Gannibal its author calls a "sketch dealing mainly with the mysterious origins of Pushkin's African anscestor": his great-grandfather, who, as Nabokov recounts, was born into a noble Abyssinian family, enslaved, and eventually (around 1706 brought to Russia and adopted as a godchild by Peter the Great. He became a major-general and died at 88, in 17870. Like the rest of Nabokov's Eugene Onegin commentary, the Gannibal essay was "the outcome of many pleasant afternoons spent in the splendid libraries of Cornell, Harvard, and the City of New York." One critic called it "factually elusive, but imaginatively woven out of the threads of non-evidence and mysteriously and delightfully there" (Sidney Monas, The Hudson Review, ISBN: 0691017603 $53.00USD
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