Lectures on Literature Read online

  Corrections and modifications have been performed silently. It has seemed to be of no practical value to a reader to know, for instance, that in one place in a Joyce lecture Nabokov slipped and wrote "Irishman" when "Irishmen" was required, that he once forgot that Bloom had lived at the "City Arms" and called it the "King's Arms," that he ordinarily wrote "Blaze" for Blazes Boylan and often "Steven" for Stephen Dedalus. Thus the only footnotes are either Nabokov's own or else occasional editorial comments on points of interest such as the application of some isolated jotting, whether among the manuscripts or in the annotated copy of the teaching book, to the text of the lecture at hand. The mechanics of the lectures, such as Nabokov's notes to himself, often in Russian, have been omitted as have been his markings for correct delivery of the vowel quantities in pronunciation and the accenting of syllables in certain names and unusual words. Nor do footnotes interrupt what one hopes is the flow of the discourse to indicate to the reader that an unassigned section has been editorially inserted at a particular point.

  The opening essay on "Good Readers and Good Writers" has been reconstructed from parts of his untitled written-out opening lecture to the class before the exposition began of Mansfield Park, the first book of the semester. The final "L'Envoi" is abstracted from his untitled closing remarks at the end of the semester after completing the last lecture on Ulysses and before going on to discuss the nature of the final examination.

  The editions of the books that he used as teaching copies for his lectures were selected for their cheapness and the convenience of his students. Nabokov did not hold in high regard the translations that he felt obliged to employ and, as he remarked, when he read passages from the foreign-language authors he altered them at will for reading aloud. The texts from which the quotations are taken are as follows: Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1948), Everyman's Library #23; Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1948), Everyman's Library #236; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Eleanor Marx Aveling (New York & Toronto: Rinehart, 1948); Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (New York: Pocket Books, 1941); Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Modern Library, 1956); Franz Kafka, Selected Short Stories of Franz Kafka, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Modern Library, 1952); James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1934).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The assistance provided during the preparation of this book by Vladimir Nabokov's wife, Vera, and their son Dmitri cannot be adequately acknowledged here. From the inception of this project, the Nabokovs invested untold hours advising the editor and publisher on virtually every facet of the editorial process. They patiently and tirelessly answered numerous questions about such matters as the structure of Nabokov's lectures and his preferences in matters of diction. Their painstaking advice has made this volume better than it could have been without them.

  Grateful acknowledgment is due as well to the following persons: Else Albrecht-Carrie, Permissions Editor, New Directions Publishing Corporation; Alfred Appel, Professor of English, Northwestern University; Brian Boyd, Professor of English, University of Auckland; Donald D. Eddy, Professor of English, Cornell University; Richard Ellman, Professor of English, Oxford University; Paul T. Heffron, Acting Chief, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Cathleen Jaclyn, Cornell University Libraries; Joanne McMillan, The Children's Hospital Medical Center; Nina W. Matheson; Myra Orth; Stephen Jan Parker, Editor Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter; and Stephanie Welch, Wellesley University.

  Introduction

  by John Updike

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on Shakespeare's birthday in 1899, in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), into a family both aristocratic and wealthy. The family name, indeed, may stem from the same Arabic root as the word nabob, having been brought into Russia by the fourteenth-century Tatar prince Nabok Murza. Since the eighteenth century the Nabokovs had enjoyed distinguished military and governmental careers. Our author's grandfather, Dmitri Nikolaevich, was State Minister of Justice for the tsars Alexander II and Alexander III; his son, Vladimir Dmitrievich, forsook a certain future in court circles in order to join, as politician and journalist, the doomed fight for constitutional democracy in Russia. A courageous and combative liberal who was sent to prison for three months in 1908, he without misgiving maintained himself and his immediate family in a life of upper-class luxury divided between the townhouse built by his father in the fashionable Admiralteiskaya region of St. Petersburg, and the country estate, Vyra, brought by his wife—of the immensely rich Rukavishnikov family—to the marriage as part of her dowry. Their first surviving child, Vladimir, received, in the testimony of his siblings, a uniquely generous portion of parental love and attention. He was precocious, spirited, at first sickly and then robust. A friend of the household remembered him as "the slender, well-proportioned boy with the expressive, lively face and intelligent probing eyes which glittered with sparks of mockery."

  V. D. Nabokov was something of an Anglophile, and his children were tutored in English as well as French. His son, in his memoir Speak, Memory, claims, "I learned to read English before I could read Russian," and remembers an early "sequence of English nurses and governesses," as well as a procession of comfortable Anglo-Saxon artifacts: "All sorts of snug, mellow things came in a steady procession from the English Shop on Nevski Avenue: fruitcakes, smelling salts, playing cards, picture puzzles, striped blazers, talcum-white tennis balls." Of the authors lectured upon in this volume, Dickens was probably the first encountered. "My father was an expert on Dickens, and at one time read to us children, aloud, chunks of Dickens, in English, of course," Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson forty years after the event. "Perhaps his reading to us aloud, on rainy evenings in the country, Great Expectations ... when I was a boy of twelve or thirteen, prevented me mentally from re-reading Dickens later on." It was Wilson who directed his attention to Bleak House in 1950. Of his boyhood reading, Nabokov recalled to a Playboy interviewer, "Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—English, Russian, and French—than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes." This last level of reading may help account for Nabokov's surprising, though engaging, inclusion of such a piece of late-Victorian fog-swaddled Gothic as Stevenson's tale of Jekyll and Hyde within his course of European classics.

  A French governess, the stout, well-memorialized Mademoiselle, took up abode in the Nabokov household when young Vladimir was six, and though Madame Bovary is absent from the list of French novels which she so trippingly ("her slender voice sped on and on, never weakening, without the slightest hitch or hesitation") read aloud to her charges—"We got it all: Les Malheurs de Sophie, Le Tourdu Monde en Quatre Vingts Jours, Le Petit Chose, Les Miserables, Le Comte de Monte Cristo, many others"—the book undoubtedly existed in the family library. After V. D. Nabokov's senseless murder on a Berlin stage in 1922, "a fellow student of his, with whom he had gone for a bicycle trip in the Black Forest, sent my widowed mother the Madame Bovary volume which my father had had with him at the time and on the flyleaf of which he had written 'The unsurpassed pearl of French literature'—a judgment that still holds." Elsewhere in Speak, Memory, Nabokov writes of his rapturous reading of the work of Mayne Reid, an Irish author of American Westerns, and states of a lorgnette held by one of Reid's beleaguered heroines, "That lorgnette I found afterward in the hands of Madame Bovary, and later Anna Karenin had it, and then it passed into the possession of Chekhov's Lady with the Lapdog and was lost by her on the pier at Yalta." At what age he might have first perused Flaubert's classic study of adultery, we can only guess a precocious one; he read War and Peace for the first time when he was eleven, "in Berlin, on a Turkish sofa, in our som
berly rococo Privatstrasse flat giving on a dark, damp back garden with larches and gnomes that have remained in that book, like an old postcard, forever."

  At this same age of eleven, Vladimir, having been tutored entirely at home, was enrolled in St. Petersburg's relatively progressive Tenishev School, where he was accused by teachers "of not conforming to my surroundings; of showing off (mainly by peppering my Russian papers with English and French terms, which came naturally to me); of refusing to touch the filthy wet towels in the washroom; of fighting with my knuckles instead of using the slaplike swing with the underside of the fist adopted by Russian scrappers." Another alumnus of the Tenishev School, Osip Mandelstam, called the students there "little ascetics, monks in their own puerile monastery." The study of Russian literature emphasized medieval Rus—the Byzantine influence, the ancient chronicles—and proceeded through study of Pushkin in depth to the works of Gogol, Lermontov, Fet, and Turgenev. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were not in the syllabus. At least one teacher, Vladimir Hippius, "a first-rate though somewhat esoteric poet whom I greatly admired," impressed himself forcibly on the young student; Nabokov at the age of sixteen published a collection of his own poems and Hippius "brought a copy with him to class and provoked the delirious hilarity of the majority of my classmates by applying his fiery sarcasm (he was a fierce man with red hair) to my most romantic lines."

  Nabokov's secondary education ended as his world was collapsing. In 1919, his family became emigres. "It was arranged that my brother and I would go up to Cambridge, on a scholarship awarded more in atonement for political tribulations than in acknowledgment of intellectual merit." He studied Russian and French literature, much as at the Tenishev School, and played soccer, wrote poetry, romanced a number of young ladies, and never once visited the University Library. Among his desultory memories of his college years there is one of "P.M. storming into my room with a copy of Ulysses freshly smuggled from Paris." In a Paris Review interview Nabokov names the classmate, Peter Mrosovsky, and admits that he did not read the book through until fifteen years later, when he "liked it enormously." In Paris in the mid-thirties he and Joyce met a few times. Once Joyce attended a reading Nabokov gave. The Russian was pinch-hitting for a suddenly indisposed Hungarian novelist before a sparse and motley crowd: "A source of unforgettable consolation was the sight of Joyce sitting, arms folded and glasses glinting, in the midst of the Hungarian football team." On another inauspicious occasion in 1938, they dined together with their mutual friends Paul and Lucie Leon; of their conversation Nabokov remembered nothing and his wife Vera recalled that "Joyce asked about the exact ingredients of myod, the Russian 'mead,' and everybody gave him a different answer." Nabokov distrusted such social conjunctions of writers and in an earlier letter to Vera had recounted a version of the legendary single, fruitless encounter between Joyce and Proust. When did Nabokov first read Proust? The English novelist Henry Green in his memoir Pack My Bag wrote of Oxford in the early twenties that "anyone who pretended to care about good writing and who knew French knew his Proust." Cambridge was likely no different, though as a student there Nabokov was intent upon his own Russian-ness to an obsessive degree—"my fear of losing or corrupting, through alien influence, the only thing I had salvaged from Russia—her language—became positively morbid...."At any rate, by the time he granted his first published interview, in 1932, to a correspondent for a Riga newspaper, he can say, rejecting the suggestion of any German influence on his work during the Berlin years, "One might more properly speak about a French influence: I love Flaubert and Proust."

  Though Nabokov lived for over fifteen years in Berlin, he never learned—by his own high linguistic standards—German. "I speak and read German poorly," he told the Riga interviewer. Thirty years later, speaking in a filmed interview for the Bayerischer Rundfunk, he expanded upon the question: "Upon moving to Berlin I was beset by a panicky fear of somehow flawing my precious layer of Russian by learning to speak German fluently. The task of linguistic occlusion was made easier by the fact that I lived in a closed emigre circle of Russian friends and read exclusively Russian newspapers, magazines, and books. My only forays into the local language were the civilities exchanged with my successive landlords or landladies and the routine necessities of shopping: Ich möchte etwas Schinken. I now regret that I did so poorly; I regret it from a cultural point of view." Yet he had been acquainted with German entomological works since boyhood, and his first literary success was a translation, in the Crimea, of some Heine songs for a Russian concert singer. In later life, his wife knew German, and with her help he checked translations of his own works into that language and ventured to improve, in his lectures on "The Metamorphosis," upon the English version by Willa and Edwin Muir. There is no reason to doubt the claim he makes, in his introduction to the translation of his rather Kafkaesque novel Invitation to a Beheading, that at the time of its writing in 1935 he had read no Kafka. In 1969 he told a BBC interviewer, "I do not know German and so could not read Kafka before the nineteen thirties when his La metamorphose appeared in La nouvelle revue francaise"; two years later he told Bavarian Broadcasting, "I read Goethe and Kafka en regard as I also did Homer and Horace."

  The first author herein lectured upon was the last Nabokov enrolled among his subjects. The event can be followed with some closeness in The Nabokov-Wilson Letters (Harper & Row, 1978). On 17 April 1950, Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson from Cornell, where he had recently taken academic employment: "Next year I am teaching a course called 'European Fiction' (XIX and XX c.). What English writers (novels or short stories) would you suggest? I must have at least two." Wilson promptly responded, "About the English novelists: in my opinion the two incomparably greatest (leaving Joyce out of account as an Irishman) are Dickens and Jane Austen. Try rereading, if you haven't done so, the later Dickens of Bleak House and Little Dorrit. Jane Austen is worth reading all through—even her fragments are remarkable." On 5 May, Nabokov wrote back, "Thanks for the suggestion concerning my fiction course. I dislike Jane, and am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers. They are in another class. Could never see anything in Pride and Prejudice.... I shall take Stevenson instead of Jane A." Wilson countered, "You are mistaken about Jane Austen. I think you ought to read Mansfield Park.... She is, in my opinion, one of the half dozen greatest English writers (the others being Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Keats and Dickens). Stevenson is second-rate. I don't know why you admire him so much—though he has done some rather fine short stories." And, uncharacteristically, Nabokov capitulated, writing on 15 May, 'I am in the middle of Bleak House—going slowly because of the many notes I must make for class-discussion. Great stuff.... I have obtained Mansfield Park and I think I shall use it too in my course. Thanks for these most useful suggestions." Six months later, he wrote Wilson with some glee:

  I want to make my mid-term report on the two books you suggested I should discuss with my students. In connection with Mansfield Park I had them read the works mentioned by the characters in the novel—the two first cantos of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," Cowper's "The Task," passages from King Henry the Eighth, Crabbe's tale "The Parting Hour," bits of Johnson's The Idler, Browne's address to "A Pipe of Tobacco" (Imitation of Pope), Sterne's Sentimental Journey (the whole "gate-and-no-key" passage comes from there—and the starling) and of course Lovers' Vows in Mrs. Inchbald's inimitable translation (a scream).... I think I had more fun than my class.

  Nabokov in his early Berlin years supported himself by giving lessons in an unlikely quintet of subjects: English, French, boxing, tennis, and prosody. In the latter years of exile, public readings in Berlin and in such other centers of emigre population as Prague, Paris, and Brussels earned more money than the sales of his works in Russian. So, but for his lack of an advanced degree, he was not unprepared, arriving in America in 1940, for the lecturer's role that was to provide, until the publication of Lolita, his main source of income. At Wellesley for the first time, in 1941, he delivered an assortment of lectures among whose tit
les—"Hard Facts about Readers," "A Century of Exile," "The Strange Fate of Russian Literature"—was one included in this volume, "The Art of Literature and Commonsense." Until 1948 he lived with his family in Cambridge (at 8 Craigie Circle, his longest-maintained address until the Palace Hotel in Montreux received him for keeps in 1961) and divided his time between two academic appointments: that of Resident Lecturer at Wellesley College, and as Research Fellow in Entomology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He worked tremendously hard in those years, and was twice hospitalized. Besides instilling the elements of Russian grammar into the heads of young women and pondering the minute structures of butterfly genitalia, he was creating himself as an American writer, publishing two novels (one written in English in Paris), an eccentric and witty book on Gogol, and, in The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, stories, reminiscences, and poems of an arresting ingenuity and elan. Among the growing body of admirers for his English writings was Morris Bishop, light-verse virtuoso and head of the Romance Languages Department at Cornell; he mounted a successful campaign to hire Nabokov away from Wellesley, where his resident lectureship was neither remunerative nor secure. According to Bishop's reminiscence "Nabokov at Cornell" (TriQuarterly, No. 17, Winter 1970: a special issue devoted to Nabokov on his seventieth birthday), Nabokov was designated Associate Professor of Slavic and at first gave "an intermediate reading course in Russian Literature and an advanced course on a special subject, usually Pushkin, or the Modernist Movement in Russian Literature.... As his Russian classes were inevitably small, even invisible, he was assigned a course in English on Masters of European Fiction." According to Nabokov, the nickname by which Literature 311-312 was known, "Dirty Lit," "was an inherited joke: it had been applied to the lectures of my immediate predecessor, a sad, gentle, hard-drinking fellow who was more interested in the sex life of the authors than in their books."