Word: nabokovs
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...satisfied with their seats? O.K. No talking, no smoking, no knitting, no newspaper reading, no sleeping, and for God's sake take notes." So began Literature 311-312 at Cornell in the '50s, Professor Nabokov presiding. Teaching was of necessity Nabokov's livelihood in those pre-Lolita days, and he took to it as he took to all the shifting fortunes of his long émigré life: with energy, flair and an unfailing relish for the ironies of the situation. Somewhere in one of those classes, as Nabokov might have guessed, was at least one future...
...long it would take the class to notice), arrogant yet never harsh, in fact downright kindly at times. After explaining that the transformed Gregor Samsa in Kafka's The Metamorphosis was not a cockroach but a beetle, and that beneath his carapace he possessed unsuspected wings, Nabokov told his students: "This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings...
...collection of Nabokov's lectures and notes could fully recapture the flavor of his professorial persona, but Lectures on Literature comes as close as one could hope for. Elegantly edited by Fredson Bowers, handsomely printed in an oversized format, it includes discussions of seven classic European and English novels and is extensively illustrated with Nabokov's drawings, diagrams, maps, floor plans and marginal annotations ("Idiot!" he scrawled typically next to one of the many mistranslations that outraged...
...Cornell, wrote Biographer Andrew Field, "Nabokov belonged to the department of Nabokov." Just as well, considering the cheerful contempt for critical orthodoxies that resounds through these lectures. The whole historical and sociological dimension of Dickens' Bleak House, he announces, "is neither interesting nor important." He dismisses Freudian interpretations of The Metamorphosis by saying, "I am interested here in bugs, not in humbugs." As for character study in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, "the worst way to read a book is childishly to mix with the characters in it as if they were living people." Great works...
...weave," lies in their details. "One should notice and fondle details," he says. "There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected." The bulk of these lectures consists of rapt, minute scrutiny of such trifles. Nabokov does a virtual time-and-motion study of the daylong "dance of fate" between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Ulysses. He reads volumes into Flaubert's use of the word and in Madame Bovary. Under his microscope, the "flushed prism" of Proust's style...