From the Commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, An offprint from Bollingen Series LXXII. [New York: The Bollingen Foundation, 1963].

12mo.; white wrappers; gray dustjacket lettered in black; library stamp of Vladimir Nabokov affixed to front flap.

First separate edition, presentation issue; 200 copies (30 of which were sent directly to Nabokov gratis); off-printed from Nabokov's four volume Eugene Onegin translation—which included a commentary, two appendices (Notes on Prosody was the second), an index, and a reproduction of the 1837 second edition, the last Pushkin saw through press himself. Nabokov expected his edition to appear by the end of 1963, but waited over twelve months for its release. It seems plausible that Bollingen off-printed Notes on Prosody as a gesture of good faith, in recognition of the unusually long and taxing delays. A trade issue of 3,500 copies was issued with a slightly revised text and a different jacket, six months after the four volume set, capitalizing on the furor Nabokov’s translation had aroused. Juliar A36.1; 1991 update.

G.S. Smith has noted that Nabokov “dealt with the theory and practice of Russian versification in a number of his writings”—naming the Edmund Wilson correspondence, the versification theories of his protagonist in The Gift, and chapter 11 of Speak, Memory as worthy of special notice but rightly calls Notes on Prosody his “most substantial single work on the subject.” In a fairly balanced review, he acknowledges the contributions made by Nabokov’s “acute ear, his own refined taste in two languages, and great accuracy and consistency of observation,” and his “captivating” historical notes of  “considerable practical interest”; but he critically notes that Nabokov writes in a “private language,” uses “arcane methodology,” and ignores relevant scholarship, ultimately providing a system of analysis that “remains essentially a solipsism.” His conclusion offers an astute explanation, if not necessarily a defense:

Nabokov’s choices resembled those made by other émigré poets of the interwar period, with the marked exception of [Marina] Tsvetaeva. For them, as for all Russian poets, verse form was an ideologically semanticized area: formal innovation was characteristic of those poets who stood politically to the left, who accepted the Revolution of 1917, and remained in Russia or soon returned to it. For Nabokov, this rendered them unacceptable and the formal choices that he made indicated very graphically his nostalgia for a time before the spirit of innovation had changed Russian poetry and Russian society. His theoretical views were similar: he chose to ignore the work in versification that was one of the most genuine and lasting achievements of Soviet scholarship in the humanities, remaining faithful to the memories of his youth. [Gerald S. Smith. “Notes on Prosody.” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. NY...: Garland, 1995, pp. 561–66]