Russian/Eurasian Studies Program Presents

“Cinemizing” Fiction: Nabokov’s Lolita, Kubrick’s Lolita

In her usual provocative manner, Julia Trubikhina (Hunter College)  discusses Nabokov’s involvement in 1959–60 in the “cinemizing” of his famous novel Lolita. The result of Nabokov's collaboration with the director Stanley Kubrick was Kubrick’s acclaimed motion picture Lolita (1962) based on Nabokov’s original screenplay, of which very little remained in the film. Using Nabokov’s “tug of war” for “authorship” of the future movie (the correspondence between Nabokov and Kubrick, before and while Nabokov was working on the screenplay) as a springboard, Dr. Trubikhina explores film adaptation as a process of translation between media. The familiar questions that lie at the heart of any discussion of translation apply here in equal measure: Is the translation (the film adaptation) faithful? If it is, then to what? What of the original is translatable /adaptable? What is not and why? The speaker also compares Kubrick’s Lolita to Adrian Lyne’s film adaptation of 1997 and talks of what has changed today, in the #METOO era, as we are looking at texts to which sexual abuse of a child is so central.

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: RKC 103

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