Erik Eklund

@eklundsays

3x award-winning Nabokov specialist literature and theology at Northwest research fellow, Russian stuff at Northwestern author, AND THEN NOTHING (2026) great at parking “The dumbest smart person I’ve ever met” my beloved wife

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Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Jul 19

Fucking dammit. (A red Enzo)

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Jul 16

I love my priest.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Jul 6

What absolute and utter bullshit from UMSNT coach.

"For me, there isn't much debate here, though I do understand Belgium's perspective and Rudi's point of view," Pochettino told reporters. "I understand why people conflate issues—people always do, because there's often an agenda to mix things up—but in this case, I don't think it's right. If anyone was harmed in this whole situation, it was the United States. Can anyone justify the idea that we weren't punished? I mean, playing 30 or 35 minutes a man down in a World Cup knockout match? It's not as if we're benefiting. No, no. There's no extraordinary gain we're getting out of all this. I mean, ultimately, we aren't victims, but we aren't the villains of this story either."

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· May 29

Proofs day!

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Apr 9

Is this academic decorum?

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Mar 26

Ten years playing guitar together, playing bars wherever, getting lost in bad weather, etc. etc. etc.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Mar 17

Do you think he knows?

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Dec 17

Nabokov Studies 20 (2025) has now been published and is currently Open Access. It includes an introduction by General Editor Zoran Kuzmanovich and Associate Editor, me. 🙃 Check it out at muse.jhu.edu/issue/56115.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Dec 13

“You will be haunted by three spirits.”

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Dec 11

Oh the weird places Nabokov may make you go. Little known fact: Nabokov preferred William James to his brother Henry James.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Nov 7

ANNE! The way the vinyl unfolds.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Oct 31

I knew one day this would come in handy.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Sep 11

I don’t know these buildings. I think I am lost. Would you be good enough to take me home? Don’t mind me, just self-soothing.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Sep 6

They almost let me get away with making Nabokov the “final word” on the Trinity. So close!

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Aug 19

Must-read article, and what a photo of Zelenskyy.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Aug 9

Let’s dissolve the band, move to Idaho.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Aug 8

My dream home and after more than five years they’re still not done. And then that view. Kill me.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Aug 6

Aesthetic bliss, as Nabokov might say.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Aug 5

Based on my award-winning dissertation, my first book—And Then Nothing: Remapping Literature and Theology in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire—is now *forthcoming* from Cascade Books series in philosophical theology and theory, Veritas.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Aug 1

TFW you and your buddy are on the same wavelength.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Aug 1

Honestly tho.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Jul 21

I am absolutely elated beyond belief to share that the International Vladimir Nabokov Society has awarded my PhD dissertation, “A Triptych of Bottomless Light: Repetition, Originality & Transcendence in Nabokov’s Pale Fire,” the 2024 Zoran Kuzmanovich Prize! thenabokovian.org/news/2024-iv...

Screenshot reading:

Erik Eklund’s “A Triptych of Bottomless Light: Repetition, Identity and Transcendence in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire” is an original and valuable contribution to Nabokov scholarship. Its innovations entail not only the perspective of theology, but the elaboration of the textual performance of “non-identical repetition” as pervasive and significant.

Providing an insightful, specific, and well-supported reading of a novel that is much discussed but never exhausted, the thesis addresses the challenge of choice (e.g., the thematic primacy of Kinbote’s commentary or Shade’s poem) by discerning, throughout, parallel elements and patterns in addition to salient contrasts. Pale Fire does not require either-or thinking. The transcendent “otherworld” is everywhere within it.

Screenshot reading:

The thesis is enriched by its focus on Pale Fire within the context of Nabokov’s biography and other writings, to the extent that there is much to learn not only about Pale Fire, but about the rest of Nabokov’s oeuvre and imagination. The close reading in Chapter Five of the novel’s “theological heart” is a tour de force, with its scrutiny of “two texts within Nabokov’s theological library: On the Trinity of Augustine and Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas.”

The thesis constitutes a model of scholarship that is thoroughly informed about the background of the critical conversation (regarding Nabokov as well as this novel), while illuminating Pale Fire by reading it as if for the first time, by giving sharp attention to Kinbote’s Christian faith (especially in Chapter Four) and to religious allusions, including the relevance of Old English Boethius. As an interdisciplinary work, it is also a model of scholarship “delineating a theological authorial presence” in the work of an author whose explicit statements on religion were more equivocal than transparent.

Erik Eklund’s thesis is ambitious and inspiring; reading it is a command to rise to the occasion

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Jun 18

The best part is being the one religion and literature person at a religion or literature conference and the other thing gets brought up. “You’re assuming the other thing is stable and we really have no idea what the fuck is going on.”

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Mar 27

Nine years ago today, I wore monk straps.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Feb 11

From Vladimir Nabokov’s 1938 short story, “Tyrants Destroyed.”

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Jan 27

I’ve always assumed that here, in Michelangelo’s “Creation of Man,” that God is reaching out his hand to Adam, but now I think the divine touch has already occurred, that what we see here is the divine withdrawal, as Adam is already animate, already dying.

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Jan 9

I’m not crying, you’re crying. This, by Daniel Adam Lightsey, from the inaugural issue of the Northwestern University Studies in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought, titled “Le style c’est l’homme: Sergii Bulgakov, Vladimir Nabokov, & the Artist’s Podvig.”

Erik Eklund@eklundsays· Jan 3

Antony of Egypt. Because of the ways he is changed by and changes with the artists he captivated—most notably his literacy. Also, modern fiction after Flaubert, from him to Morrison, is utterly unthinkable without Antony’s strange intercession.