Dickens or Joyce, but seems never to have altered materially his written-out Wellesley lectures for delivery at Cornell. However, since the Russian lectures covered such familiar ground for him, it is possible that at Cornell he modified his discourse with more extemporaneous comment and was less rigid in his delivery, described thus in
*
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 5.
†
Nabokov's lectures on the non-Russian European writers have been published in
‡
Among the authors that Dmitri Nabokov lists as having been taught during the Cornell years are Pushkin, Zhukovski, Karamazin, Griboedov, Krylov, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Derzhavin, Awakum, Batyushkov, Gnedich, Fonvizin, Fet, Leskov, Blok, and Goncharov. If these had all been included in one course, it must have been a rapid survey. In the spring of 1952 while a visiting lecturer at Harvard, Nabokov gave a seminar in Pushkin alone, presumably from material he was collecting for his edition of
5
reading, not speaking.' Indeed, for some of his lectures on Chekhov, and especially for the lecture on Tolstoy's 'Ivan Ilyich,'
reading from manuscript would have been quite impossible since no finished script exists.
One may also detect a more subtle difference than that of structure. In lecturing on the great nineteenth- century Russian writers of fiction Nabokov was completely in his element. Not only did these writers represent to him the absolute height of Russian literature (with Pushkin, of course) but they also flourished counter to the utilitarianism that he despised both in the social critics of the time and, more bitingly, in its later Soviet development. In this respect the public lecture 'Russian Writers, Censors, and Readers' mirrors the attitude one finds in his approach. In the classroom lectures the social element in Turgenev is deplored, that in Dostoevski is ridiculed, but Gorki's works are savaged. Just as in
Correspondingly, in the Tolstoy series he regrets, half smiling, that Tolstoy did not see that the beauty of the curls of dark hair on Anna's tender neck was artistically more important than Lyovin's (Tolstoy's) views on agriculture. The emphasis on artistry in
Tolstoy's world perfectly imaged Nabokov's lost homeland. The nostalgia he felt at the disappearance of this world and its people (he had met Tolstoy as a child) strengthens his typical emphasis on the artistic presentation of life in the fiction of Russia's golden age, especially in the works of Gogol, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. In aesthetics, artistic is, of course, not far from aristocratic, and it is not too much to suggest that both of these powerful strains in Nabokov may lie in back of his repugnance at what he regarded as Dostoevski's false sentimen-talism. They certainly feed his contempt for Gorki. Because he was lecturing on Russian literature in translation Nabokov could not discuss the importance of style in any precise detail; but it seems clear that his dislike of Gorki (apart from political considerations) was based as much on his proletarian style as on what Nabokov regarded as the ineptness of his presentation of character and situation. His lack of admiration for Dostoevski's style may also have influenced in part his generally unfavorable judgment of this writer. Wonderfully effective are the several occasions when Nabokov quotes Tolstoy's Russian in the original to illustrate to his hearers the extraordinary effects from sound joined to sense.
The pedagogical stance that Nabokov adopts in these lectures does not differ materially from that found in
This is not to say, however, that critical analysis is in any way wanting in these lectures. He may make plain important hidden themes as when he points out in
and Vronski their spiritually sterile and egotistic emotions doom them, whereas Kitty's marriage to Lyovin brings the Tolstoyan ideal of harmony, responsibility, tenderness, truth, and family joys.
Nabokov is fascinated by Tolstoy's time schemes. The how of the feeling that the reader's and the author's time-sense completely coincide in a manner that produces ultimate reality he gives up as an unsolved secret. But Tolstoy's juggling of the time-scheme between the Anna-Vronski and the Kitty-Lyovin actions is worked out in most interesting detail. He can point out how Tolstoy's presentation of Anna's thoughts in her drive through Moscow on the day of her death anticipates the stream-of-consciousness technique of James Joyce. He has an eye for the oddity, also, as that two officers in Vronski's regiment represent the first portrayal of homosexuality in modern literature.
He is tireless in illustrating how Chekhov made the ordinary seem of supreme value to the reader. If he criticizes the banality of Turgenev's character biographies interrupting the narrative and the relation of what happens to everyone after the ending of the story proper, Nabokov can yet appreciate the delicacy of Turgenev's cameo descriptions and of his modulated sinuous style, which he compares to 'a lizard sun-charmed on a wall.' If the mark of Dostoevski's sentimentality offends him, as in his outraged description of Raskolnikov and the prostitute in
It is the mark of a great teacher as well as critic that he can rise to the author's level in a masterpiece. Particularly in the Tolstoy lectures, which provide the most exhilarating reading and are the heart of this volume, Nabokov from time to time joins Tolstoy at a dizzy level of imaginative experience. The interpretive description with which he guides the reader through the story of
Perhaps the most valuable contribution that Nabokov made to his students was not merely his emphasis on