´The Centenary of the Russo-American writer Vladimir Nabokov falls in April 1999. How often does the end of a century - with its inevitable summing up of the period - so nearly and neatly coincide with the Centenary of a major literary figure? It is an expecially propitious time for new volumes about one of the greatest figures of XXth Century Literature. Professor Tammi … has written one of the most original Nabokov studies ever published. By an unlikely stroke of fate, one of the four major sections of his study deals with Nabokov and fatidic dates. This is an absolutely novel and significant topic that has been mentioned by other scholars only en passant in connection with specific Nabokov books. Professor Tammi not only provides an overview of the topic in Nabokov´s oeuvre but, for the first time, puts it into a theoretical framework. Much the same can be said of the other sections of his study. The first chapter is on the much-discussed matter of the subtexts in Invitation to a Beheading. Here Tammi finds not only new material but, more importantly, uses his findings (and those of others) to build and amplify the theoretical basis of what has traditionally been the rather haphazard study of subtextual allusions. The second chapter, a study of polygenetic allusions, expands on the typology of subtexts and provides illuminating illustrations ranging over much of Nabokov work. A later chapter addresses the hitherto untouched subject of the role of Nabokov´s allusions to his native Saint Petersburg in his writings. Professor Tammi displays a splendid command of existing Western and Russian scholarship on Nabokov. His volume will be of equal interest to Nabokovians and to literary theoreticians´

D. Barton Johnson

University of California

Founding Editor, Nabokov Studies