Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This was the rationale behind the recent publication of Nabokov's college lectures on Russian literature. Volume One of these notes, last year's Christmas special, dealt with English, French, and German masterpieces. It turns out that Nabokov knew a great deal more about Russian literature than about any other. Certainly he is more comfortable in this second volume. He is still, as always, petulant, self-indulgent, and pompous, and since Nabokov insists upon his own status in the Pantheon of literature--which was not so obvious when he was writing these lectures--he has made a conspicuous target...
...Nabokov's original audiences were undergraduates at Wellesley and Cornell in the 1940s and 1950s. He had sojourned in England and Germany before moving to America in 1940. He began to write in English and taught college literature courses (including a seminar at Harvard) for a living. The extraordinary success of Lolita in 1958 allowed him to retire from the world...
...volumes of lectures reveal a method and manner of teaching almost as fascinating as the content. It is amusing to see a famous novelist insisting upon numbered seats, cracking jokes about life in Ithaca or working out grading formulas. Nabokov's usual procedure is to introduce each novelist with a few choice and highly opinionated general comments, and then turn to the text and tackle it almost word by word. Not afraid to rank his favorites, 1-2-3, he is equally unafraid to slander his least favorites...
Only occasionally will Nabokov descend to biography or history or philosophy. Great art, says he, is sufficient unto itself. Nabokov is interested in words: what they sound like, and how they can be arranged. With words, the artist creates his own imaginary world, a world without values, ideas, or social relevance. For Nabokov, literature is a detective game: The reader tries of solve the word code and enter the imaginary world. Nabokov describes the sensual pleasure he finds in art: a certain tingling feeling in the spinal cord, he says. His cowering pupils are told over and over again that...
...this, the old aristocrat cannot help dropping a few historical observations in his Russian course. History, after all, forced him into exile in the first place. He unequivocally condemns the Soviet Union and the literature it has produced. Beyond this point, however, his politics are naive. Nabokov was fond of arguing in vaguely libertarian terms: that the ideal state would be one where everyone left everyone else alone. With this, he would wash his hands of politics, along with philosophy, theology, ethics, and any other stray ideas...