Word: nabokovs
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First at Stanford, then for seven years as a part-time lecturer in the Russian language at Wellesley, with side jobs as a lepidopterist in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology (plus a few more tennis lessons), and finally as a professor at Cornell from 1948 to 1958, Nabokov studied America, as a colleague at Cornell puts it, like someone "in Madagascar observing the natives." In 1945 he became an American citizen. They occupied a succession of rented houses?more or less bivouacked in the quarters of a different absentee professor each year ?partly for lack of cash, partly...
...teacher, Nabokov was provocative, tough, highhanded. At Wellesley, anxious to get off on a June butterfly hunt, he startled the registrar's office by wanting to turn in his grades before the final exam. He already knew, he said, exactly what each of his students was worth. When he did give an exam, it was demanding. Appalled by the constant cheating, he browbeat students to go to the toilet before the papers were passed out and pressed fresh pencils into the hands of examinees rather than let them go to the sharpener...
Despite such goings-on, at Cornell Nabokov's course in Modern Fiction (also known as Dirty Lit) became famous. Nabokov detested "oldfashioned human interest criticism." It consists, he once reprovingly wrote oldfashioned, human-interest Critic Edmund Wilson, "of removing the characters from an author's imaginary world to the imaginary, but generally far less plausible, world of the critic, who then proceeds to examine these displaced characters as if they were 'real people.'" He refused to deal in such "dreadful things as trends," or offer traditional chatter about themes and schools of literature. Instead, he performed brilliant, instant autopsies...
...with the help of Nabokov's most influential American
...friend, Harvard Critic Harry Levin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov's first novel written in English, was published. A haunting, accomplished and entirely Nabokovian novel about a man who loses his own identity trying to write the fictional biography of his lost brother, it appeared almost unnoticed. By the time he reached Cornell he had published Bend Sinister (1947), a study of a police state, parts of Speak, Memory, one of the most beautiful autobiographies in English. Yet he was barely known on campus as a man of letters, much less a literary genius...