Lectures on Russian literature

antithesis, the man who had stolen the cloak. Thus the story describes a full circle : a vicious circle as all circles are, despite their posing as apples, or planets, or human faces.

So to sum up: the story goes this way: mumble, mumble,

lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave,

mumble, fantastic climax, mumble, mumble, and back into

the chaos from which they all had derived. At this

superhigh level of art, literature is of course not concerned

with pitying the underdog or cursing the upperdog. It

appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the

shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless

and soundless ships.

As one or two patient readers may have gathered by now,

this is really the only appeal that interests me. My purpose

in jotting these notes on Gogol has, I hope, become

perfectly clear. Bluntly speaking it amounts to the

following; if you expect to find out something about

Russia, if you are eager to/know why the blistered Germans

bungled their blitz, if you are interested in 'ideas' and

'facts' and 'messages,' keep away from Gogol. The awful

trouble of learning Russian in order to read him will not be

repaid in your kind of hard cash. Keep away, keep away. He

has nothing to tell you. Keep off the tracks. High tension.

Closed for the duration. Avoid, refrain, don't. I would like to

have here a full list of all possible interdictions, vetoes and

threats. Hardly necessary of course—as the wrong sort of

The opening page of Nabokov's Turgenev notebook.

reader will certainly never get as far as this. But I do

welcome the right sort—my brothers, my doubles. My

brother is playing the organ. My sister is reading. She is my

aunt. You will first learn the alphabet, the labials, the Unguals, the dentals, the letters that buzz, the drone and the bumblebee, and the Tse-tse Fly. One of the vowels will make you say 'Ugh!' You will feel mentally stiff and bruised after your first declension of personal pronouns. I see however no other way of getting to Gogol (or to any other Russian writer for that matter). His work, as all great literary achievements, is a phenomenon of language and not one of ideas. 'Gaw-gol,'

not 'Go-gall.' The final '1' is a soft dissolving '1' which does not exist in English. One cannot hope to understand an author if one cannot even pronounce his name. My translations of various passages are the best my poor vocabulary could afford, but even had they been as perfect as those which I hear with my innermost ear, without being able to render their intonation, they still would not replace Gogol. While trying to convey my attitude towards his art I have not produced any tangible proofs of its peculiar existence. I can only place my hand on my heart and affirm that I have not imagined Gogol.

He really wrote, he really lived.

Gogol was born on the 1st of April, 1809. According to his mother (who, of course, made up the following dismal anecdote) a poem he had written at the age of five was seen by Kapnist, a well-known writer of sorts. Kapnist embraced the solemn urchin and said to the glad parents: 'He will become a writer of genius if only destiny gives him a good Christian for teacher and guide. ' But the other thing—his having been born on the 1st of April—is true.

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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

IVAN TURGENEV (1818-1883)

Ivan Sergeievich Turgenev was born in 1818 in Orel, Central Russia,

in the family of a wealthy squire. His early youth was spent on a country estate where he was able to observe the life of the serfs and the relations between master and serf at their worst: his mother was possessed of a tyrannical nature and led her peasants and also her immediate family a miserable life. Though she adored her son, she persecuted him and had him flogged for the least childish disobedience or misdemeanor. In later life, when Turgenev tried to intercede for the serfs, she cut his allowance, obliging him to live in misery in spite of the rich inheritance that awaited him. Turgenev never forgot the painful impressions of his childhood. After his mother's death he did much to improve the peasants' circumstances, freed all his domestic servants, and went out of his way to cooperate with the government when the peasants were emancipated in 1861.

Turgenev's early education was patchy. Among his numerous tutors, indiscriminately engaged by his mother, there were all sorts of odd people, including at least one professional saddler. One year at the Moscow University and three at the Petersburg University, whence he was graduated in 1837, did not give him a feeling of having obtained a well-balanced education, and from 1838 to 1841 he attended the university in Berlin, filling out its gaps. During his life in Berlin he became intimate with a group of young Russians similarly engaged, who later formed the nucleus of a Russian philosophic movement highly colored by Hegelianism, the German 'idealist' philosophy.

In his early youth Turgenev produced some half-baked poems mostly imitative of Mikhail Lermontov. Only in 1847, when he turned to prose and published a short story, the first of his series of A Sportsman's Sketches, did he come into his own as a writer. The story produced a tremendous impression and when later together with a number of others it was published as a volume, the impression only grew stronger. Turgenev's plastic musical flowing prose was but one of the reasons that brought him immediate fame, for at least as much interest was contributed by the special subject of these stories. They were all written about serfs and not only present a detailed psychological study, but go even further to idealize these serfs as superior in their human quality to their heartless masters.

From these stories some purple patches:

'Fedya, not without pleasure, lifted the forcedly smiling dog up into the air and placed it into the bottom of the cart.'

('Khor' and Kalinych')

'... a dog, all his body a-quiver, his eyes half-closed, was gnawing a bone on the lawn.' ('My Neighbor Radilov')

'Vyacheslav Illarionovich is a tremendous admirer of the gentle sex, and as soon as he sees a pretty little person on the boulevard of his country-town, he there and then starts to follow her, but —and this is the peculiar point—he at once begins to limp.' ('Two Country Squires')

At sunset on a country-road:

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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

'Masha (the hero's gypsy mistress who left him) stopped and turned her face to him. She stood with her back to the light —

and thus appeared to be of a dusky black all over, as if carved in dark wood. The whites of her eyes alone stood out like silver almonds, whereas the iris had grown still darker.' ('Chertopkhanov's End')

'Evening had come, the sun had hid behind a small aspen grove ... its shadow spread endlessly across the still fields. A peasant could be seen riding at a trot on white horse along a dark narrow path skirting that distant grove; he could be seen quite clearly, every detail of him, even the patch on his shoulder—although he was moving in the shade; the legs of his horse flickered with a kind of pleasing distinctness. The setting sun flushed the trunks of the aspen-trees with such a warm glow that they seemed the color of pine-trunks.' {Fathers and Sons)

These are Turgenev at his very best. It is these- mellow colored little paintings—rather watercolors than the