LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Nabokov’s Son Writes On Fate of Department To the Editor: To all within and outside of the University who are concerned with Cornell’s survival as an institution of the first rank, including the presi- dent, the trustees, the department heads and all partisans of good education: 1 am stunned by what I hear. At a time when worldwide centennial cele- brations begin for the Nabokovian who gave rebirth and fame to the century-old study of Russian literature at Cornell — Vladimir Nabokov himself — can it be that this very department is being abolished? How often the volumes known collectively as his “Cornell Lectures” are cited as the supreme authority in various countries and translations! The eminent Russian scholars of Cornell — George Gibian, who captained a Nabokov festi- val with worldwide resonance in 1982; Gavriel Shapiro, whose fine performance I had occasion to admire at the recent Sorbonne conference; their colleagues; the outstanding graduate fel- lows — should be sources of pride, not objects of corporate cost-cutting. I speak not only as my father’s son, and not only about the academic milieu. From an inter- national vantage point, I perceive a growing tural imbalance between the leaders of the EBC and their American counterparts who must deal with them ever more closely. How many cultur ally disadvantaged CEO's do we have to one Bob Lutz of Chrysler, who can cite and discuss Baudelaire at a French auto show, Heine im Frenkfurt or Nabokov at the Viper Invitationals? But it goes further than that. In an age when — essential learning tools — and sources of joy — like Latin are being purged from our schools, is it fair to deprive the hopeful student at a great University of the sheer aesthetic bliss of proper study, within a dedicated department, of one of the world’s foremost literatures? To say nothing of the singularly bad timing — with regard to awakening Russia herself: even amid his country’s catastrophic problems, the — average Russian reads. Whether the Cornell graduate in Russia will commune with scholars, government officials, honest businessmen or run-of-the-mill Mafiosi, he will find a good liter- ary frame of reference priceless. ‘And must we, in America, relegate a grei language and its literature to the waste-| marked “intellectual elitism”? Can't Cornell economize on something else to keep from going under? Dmitri Nabokov