Word: nabokovs
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NONFICTION: Abroad, Paul Fussell American Dreams: Lost and Found, Studs Terkel ∙ Lyndon, Merle Miller Merton: A Biography, Monica Furlong ∙ Naming Names, Victor Navasky ∙ The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers
...page, unenlivened by Nabokov's rich accent or his antic platform mannerisms, this methodical tracing of specifics could be slow going. Yet it never lapses into dry exegesis. Nabokov keeps stepping back for a longer view of his subject from some surprising angle. Dickens, he insists, is anything but sentimental in his treatment of children in Bleak House. Madame Bovary, that supposed landmark of realism, he finds to be a tissue of implausibilities (although he adds that they do not matter). Above all, he continually exhorts the reader to look for his own angles, to read "not with...
...Nabokov's faith in the transforming magic of an artist's style leads him to overrate the beautifully written blarney of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By the same token, he somewhat underrates Jane Austen, who, despite her "pert, precise and polished" prose, is so deeply rooted in the quotidian that he misses her enchantment. Yet he celebrates his own aesthetic, the "capacity to wonder at trifles," with an ardor that is irresistible. "These asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness," he maintains...
This is nothing less than an artistic credo, a point that readers today can appreciate more readily than the students of Literature 311-312. The enormous success of Lolita in 1958, which freed Nabokov from teaching, made most people aware for the first time that he had practically a lifetime of such writing behind him. Had the students only known it, their professor was not only explaining Dickens or Flaubert or Kafka. With his quirky insights, his cunning traceries and meticulous diagrams, he was also charting the mind of another great novelist: himself. -By Christopher Porterfield
...Milosz, his wife and two sons moved to Berkeley, where the poet joined the faculty of the University of California. Reminiscent of another émigré professor, Vladimir Nabokov, the new laureate has a reputation as a dazzling lecturer...