Lectures on Russian Literature

...He defined his predecessors by his allusions, the resonance of his language by the books off which it bounced...

...with peculiarities deriving from human idiosyncrasy, and the how-to book, far from providing us with real assistance, ultimately leaves us with a sense of the hollowness of its advice and the loneliness of our own situations...

...unf o r t u n a t e l y , Nabokov's wonderful and extensive analysis of that scene comes eighty pages earlier in the text than the illustration, but the whole remains one of the most acute studies ever done of a l i t e r a r y work...

...I do want to give encouragement and support to those take charge of their own lives, those who are willing to stand up for their rights!' Very noble, very nice...

...that with Proust he shared a passionate artistry of memory...

...This is, I think, more in the arena of faith than in that of criticism, but Nabokov comes close to proving it...

...Nabokov's first major publication was a translation into Russian of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...

...In a novel the lack of action or speech on the part of secondary characters would not have been sufficient to endow them with that kind of backstage existence, there being no footlights to stress their actual absence from the front place...

...When speaking of The Government Inspector I found pleasure in rounding up those peripheral characters that enliven the texture of its background...

...Lectures on Russian Literature contains, in the first place, one piece of very polished writing: a large portion of Nabokov's book on Gogol...

...throughout his twenty years in a Swiss hotel, Nabokov promised to publish his classroom lectures...

...On the other hand, no reader would want a manipulated text that endeavored to "improve" Nabokov's writing in any intrusive way even in some of its unpolished sections...

...The passion of Nabokov's ideas even goes beyond reasonable p r e s e n t a t i o n : "Tolstoy's prose keeps pace with our pulses, his characters seem to move with the same swing as.the people passing under our...

...The point is that "The way capitalism has exploited the alienated human needs for love and dignity and has, above all, exploited the resulting sexual obsession for profit or power, have [sic] diverted people froria paths toward true autonomy...

...E n t e r Fredson Bowers, the notorious dean of American scholarly editing, himself in his seventies...

...But the glory of Lectures on Russian Literature is the section, nearly a third of the whole, devoted to Tolstoy--mostly to Anna Karenina (translations of which should, in Nabokov's opinion, be entitled Anna Karenin...

...Try il for three weeks...

...This sounds better than it works...

...We have already seen Bowers dealing with previously published material...

...Both books include many instructive and entertaining anecdotes...

...wmf J i ( / f ' ~ ~tt~ st,x~,,~ons lac~t, h t~/~,,~ tram om A ffrH, ), brass hardware...

...Onegin t r a n s l a t o r Walter Arndt may be amused to see another of Nabokov's rhymed Pushkin translations come to light...

...To attack well, one must define the battlefield, and Nabokov's own ideas about what constitutes literature are laid out on clear tracks that carry his juggernaut to the fray...

...Neither Rusher nor Cohn ismuch -concerned here with promoting conservative politics, although neither author hides his political preferences...

...that with Flaubert and Chekhov he shared a scientific attitude and a cold eye...

...He helped support himself with English and tennis lessons--all in all, a fitting background for a future American academic, if not necessarily for a major novelist...

...Although thinking little of Tolstoy's philosophy (and conversely, admiring the man for trying to live by it), and thinking still less about Tolstoy's use of the works as vehicles for its propagation, Nabokov is continually impressed by the artistry and subtlety of Tolstoy's observations: Anna Karenina remains beautifully lucid no m a t t e r how closely one examines the apparatus of its construction...

...But n e i t h e r would we tie down Nabokov's racy syntax to the ponderous academic punctuation that with Bowers passes for "fidelity" to the original: "They sprawl over many more centuries...

...Rusher's the more literate...

...Own w~'drobe/g~s...

...The Gogol material should have been either left out altogether, since a published version was already available, or included in its totality--along with, perhaps, Nabokov's published introduction to A Hero of Our 77rues to replace his missing lecture on Lermontov...

...window while we sit reading his book...

...most existed only in handwritten form, sometimes in a number There O])l)on'tunit _9 - " _9 Y i n Al lerlca ! [-q of versions, sometimes in mere fragments--and sometimes lectures had been either delivered extemporaneously or later lost altogether...

...Yet here is an excerpt from Nabokov's original Nikolai Gogol of 1944, nicely capturing some features of Dead Souls: The faceles_9 saloon-walker in the next passage (whose movements are so quick as he welcomes the newcomers that you cannot discern his features) is again seen a minute later coming down from Chichikey's room and spelling out the name on a slip of paper as he walks down the steps...

...NY 10017(212)753-1783 A~-~ THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1982 33 I can do no better than to repeat the inappropriately appropriate close of one of his sections on Gogol: So to sum up: the storv uoes t h i s way: and back into the chaos from which they all had derived...

...Those many years of teaching, first at Wellesley, then at Cornell, left a quantity of further material on Russian and European fiction...

...Yet those manuscripts actually were often mere notes which even when typed had been endlessly modified in pen and pencil...

...Rusher tells how the hour was won by sneaking in the last word--a reference to Jane wearing "a tooth of Ho Chi Minh's on a necklace...

...How is Arnie Average to match such strokes in his own arguments...

...Cohn sneaks in a few conventional jabs at the welfare state and Rusher's book comes dressed with a friendly jacket blurb from John Kenneth Galbraith, calling it " a n amusing and informed treatise...

...he changed it to " I n such works by Gogol as The Government Inspector I find p l e a s u r e . : . " This pointless a l t e r a t i o n of the specific into the general ("such works") immediately forces Bowers to add the redundant "by Gogol...

...The passage is on page one, no less, of Lectures on Russian Literature, with the original typed copy conveniently reproduced on the facing page...

...Chronology is, however, more chance than causality, and literary history hardly begins to classify the individual genius...

...Anyone who has ever encountered or witnessed the man in debate can attest that Rusher is as formidable an opponent as you could ever hope to find...

...98: _9 every sfluation _9 I Now you can learn to speak Spanish (Conn and N.Y residents add sales tax) just as these diplomatic personnel d o - - Sh~pped m handsome library binders...

...H~mon, TX 77t)M and thrice in exile...

...His is an attempt that is, at times, brilliant, and always elegant, but an attempt that ulti mately, because this analysis is in appropriate to nonmarket transac tions, fails...

...If we did not have a statement of principles to guide us, we might be tempted to change " t h e y s p r a w l " to " b o t h sprawl" or "either sprawls"--no, of course we wouldn't...

...Never mind the.ethical question for now (Sutherland sulked that "conservatives are always doing this sort of thing" but he was given no time for a real rebuttal): The point is that beyond such obvious steps as preparing and organizing yourself, the key to winning an argument is to be William A. Rusher...

...Many students had testified to their fascination, and Nabokov's own memory seems to have improved on his legendary classroom performance: He claimed in those arch late interviews to have delivered the lectures from neatly typed manuscripts...

...The modern economic approach, as Becket describes it, "assumes that individuals maximize their utility from basic preferences that do not change rapidly over time...

...second, he acts so that the marginal benefit of a dollar spent on one activity equals, the marginal benefit of a dollar spent on any other...

...They are of course uneven...

...Rusher continues: "Actually I knew that what she wore was a piece o f metal salvaged from a U.S...

...It is this theory that Becker appropriates to explain the various phenomena of family...

...W,th ~ts t,n,que 'programmatic" learning method you your own pace--tes!mg yOurSel[ correcting I errors, re,ntorcmg accurate responses Audio-Forum Suite 113 I m ,,-,,,-, r162 on the Green, I (203) 453-9794 I I Or vlsfl our New York sales o f f i c e 145 E 49th St New York...

...Docile soul that I am, I found much in both texts to enlighten me...

...Rusher...

...Nabokov always detested the exhuming of an a u t h o r ' s l i t e r a r y remains...

...His edition of Stephen Crane was outrageous in the length and ostentation of its textual notes...

...Lawrence all wrote well about Nathaniel Hawthorne without having much else in common...

...The section on Gogol is brilliant, but readers should really turn to Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol r a t h e r than to this e x c e r p t . The section on Turgenev is sensitive, illuminating, an excellent introduction to a novelist perhaps not much read today...

...return it and well _9 refund every penny you pa~d Order today...

...No, ladies and gentlemen: Rusher and Cohn will roar with approval at the arrival o f their royalty checks as the American publishing industry marches on, churning out how-to books that promise and then deny those suckers--the book buyers--an even break...

...ace The Programr"',at~c Spanish Course conI sisls of a senes of cassettes and accompanying textbook S~moly folow the spoken I and wnlten instructions listening and repeat~r~g...

...A TREATISE ON THE FAMILY Gary Becker/Harvard University Press / $20.00 Kenneth Stein "Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution, y e t . " --Mac West I I " k.Jntil now, economists examining human institutions have kept away from the family, ignoring the household's dynamics even while using it as a fundamental unit in their calculations...

...We can applaud her for that, but hardly for the rest of what she has to say...

...He 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1982...

...With Chichikov himself and the country squires he meets they share the front stage of the book although they speak little and have no visible influence upon the course of Chichikov's adventures...

...the number of masterpieces is formidable...

...I write for those who would Do I represent this great liberal rot you're talking about...

...As for Mr...

...It's getting worse, too...

...In the course of a discussion of radio and television arguments he writes of how he impaled the reputation of Jane Fonda on a "Dick Cavett Show" when his opposite number was the actor Donald Sutherland, a friend of La Fonda...

...The lectures on literature are that dialogue in a different form...

...I don't expect anyone to agree with everything in this book," he writes...

...With this kind of dabbling going on, it should be no s u r p r i s e to find that Bowers the scholar has let a misprint creep into the passage, "taxonomic" for "taxonomic," fittingly implying a sort of poisoned text...

...The b r i e f section on Gorky can be skipped, save for its apostrophe to the Moscow Art Theater...

...The elective affinities of writers are often fascinating--Herman Melville, Henry James, and D.H...

...Here is Nabokov's famous hand-drawn sketch of the "very primitive 'sleeping c a r ' " of Anna's journey, including the direction of the blizzard that beat against its windows on the west side...

...P . _9 As a young emtgre in Berlin, he wrote book reviews, the first Russian crossword puzzles, chess problems, and professional articles on butterflies...

...T h i s is an attractive approach...

...I with the Foreign Service Inslutute's Program- _9 TO ORDER, JUST CLIPTHISADand mail matic Spanish Course I 1he US Departmenl of State l'as spent with your name and address, andacheck _9 or money order...

...And indeed, Nabokov's American years produced not only Lolita, three other novels, and Speak, Memory, but also a wonderfully perverse, book on Gogol and a brilliantly eccentric edition of Eugene Onegin...

...At his death in 1977 the project was not only unfinished but unbegun...

...Determined to prove that Dostoyevsky was no giant at all, Nabokov displays not only a thorough knowledge of the books he is debunking but a sympathy for the personal trials that, in Nabokov's view, destroyed Dostoyevsky as an artist...

...He belonged with his readers to a culture of literature...

...All we need is an accurate transcription from one book to a n o t h e r - - child's play...

...Technically speaking, the creation of peripheral personages in the play was mainly dependent upon this or that character alluding to people who never emerged from the wings...

...Bowers, having decided to omit the section on The Government Inspector, must have thought the first sentence of the second paragraph too direct in its pointing to the missing matter...

...The section on Chekhov is almost oversympathetic, an opportunity for Nabokov to elaborate his own ideal of a non-didactic literature...

...Nabokov nicely delin'eates the _9 "Turgenev maiden," celebrates the descriptions of nature, and describes Turgenev's problems with his reputation as a social critic...

...Russian literature was essential to the structure of the early Despair and then to The Gift, Nabokov's magnificent farewell to his native language...

...LECTURES ON RUSSIAN LITERATURE Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Fredson Bowers Harcourt Brace J ovanovich / $19.9 5 Charles Nicol Vtadimir Nabokov, the last great modern author, born the same year as Hemingway but much later in his impact, shared with a brilliant generation those emblematic features o f exile and translingual authority...

...What about the lectures, finally...

...To which Rusher suavely responded, "In a small way, Mr...

...In his heyday Bowers had set up a sort of bible of textual editing, laying down the commandments that no later scholar dared violate...

...I suspect it is that these books, like all how-to books, are intrinsically weakest where they might be most helpful: By addressing themselves to readers in general they address themselves to nobody in particular...

...Thus a synthetic approach has been firmly rejected, and Nabokov's language has been reproduced with fidelity save for words missing by accident and inadvertent repetitions often the result of incomplete revision...

...and beautifully simple, set of generalizations about man's behavior...

...Now, Gary Becker comes forward to remedy all that...

...yet he was still exemplary: tri-lingual Charles Nicol, Professor of English at Indiana State University, is co-editor of Nabokov's Fifth Arc, forthcommg from the University of Texas Press...

...HOW TO WIN ARGUMENTS William A. Rusher / Doubleday / $10.95 HOW TO STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS--AND WIN Roy Cohn / Simon & Schuster/$13.95 Mitchell S. Ross Here are two fresh pieces of evidence that America's book publishers are thinking of you...

...It was a dialogue not with history but with his fellow masters...

...In trying to catch Nabokov's irreverent reverence for Russian literature, I your owr...

...Roy Cohn's book, too, is filled with shrewd advice, but how much of it will ever prove useful to readers who aren't half as fast on their feet as Cohn himself...

...Gordon, he suffered a heart attack and died not too long after running into Rusher...

...but it seemed to me in reading the earlier volume that Bowers lost the thread of Nabokov's argument on Joyce and sewed the pieces together cross-patch, and the evidence in this volume is even more disquieting...

...Dostoyevsky is a special case...

...Becker explains that there is division of labor within the household for much the same reasons as within industry...

...However, if we accept a notion of self-interest narrow enough to fall short of tautology, then an analysi~ of the family follows logically...

...charge to your credil thousands of dollars develop~qg th~s course card (American Express...

...Now, Sarkes Tarz~an Inc Bloommgton, Indtana "Lectures on Literature, Harcourt Brace J o v a n o v i c h , 1980, $19.95...

...After assailing Rusher for several minutes and coming off much the worse for it, the host fmally who are willing to stop being the Caspar Milquetoasts of the world...

...Pa-vel I-va-no-vich Chi-chi-kov...

...Indeed, he is ambitious enough to want to explain not only the economics of the far/lily but the family itself, using the assumptions normally used to explain economic transactions...

...While that book may have grown out of Nabokov's lecture notes, it seems inexcusable to excerpt the sections on Dead Souls and "The Overcoat" just because Nabokov discussed those works in class...

...I Spanish at your own convenience and ~][ expiration date...

...Better to note that Nabokov's wit was his own...

...And when you consider the cases the author has to argue, you know that it has to be good...

...The t y p e s c r i p t is clean because this particular lecture was delivered only once, in 1958, at a "Festival of the Arts" at Cornell...

...Praise the Lord, his version of Nabokov's lectures is merely a "reading edition"--which means that textual notes are minimal, the statement of "Editorial Method" is brief, and Bowers has become all unbuttoned...

...Yet there is still something of the martinet and a whiff of the overbearingly incompetent here...

...embassies abroad, where E]Volumell- Intermediate 8 cassettes _9 _9 they must be able to converse fluently m il t'A~ hr).614-pagetext, plus manual...

...In discussing the stories, he sometimes has to fall back on explaining possible ways t h a t scenes might have been done badly in order to show Chekhov's originality...

...Most problems in real life are filled Mitchell S. Ross is the author of The Literary Politicians and An Invitation to Our Times...

...VISA...

...and these syllables have a taxonomic value for the identification of that particular staircase...

...Gordon, in a small way...

...In the Reagan campaign, the far Right clearly played to and diverted our rage, using the power of Government to subordinate the interests of people to profit and subjecting our lives even further to authoritarian or corporate control, while pretending to do the opposite...

...buried...

...L e t us consider Rusher's mellow meditation for a moment...

...Self-interest, construed broadly enough, can easily be viewed as the basic motivation behind human action...

...Both Rusher and Cohn are mainly filling the basic prescription of how-to books: Help the reader help himself...

...he swore he destroyed the working manuscripts of his novels...

...But in my experible, fantastic climax, mumble, mumble, nameless and soundless ships...

...Wrtte for ~. _9 ~ smashing Brtllsi~ I)races/exc~tlng American .1[ , ~ . j ~z~r~rs, BERNARDQ 24oo wuownw, # 1olin (T...

...If your tongue tends to become tied whenever you enter into high-minded coll0quies, then maybe William Rusher is your man...

...Becker begins A Treatise on the Family by telling us that he will attempt to "analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, 'prestige, and other nonmaterial behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior...

...If you are always being bumped around this rude world, always ending up on the raw end of deals, then perhaps Roy Cohn can be of service...

...Nabokov's original, discussing the small compass of Russian literature, proceeds as follows: " I t is evident t h a t n e i t h e r French nor English l i t e r a t u r e can be so compactly handled...

...bomber shot down over North Vietnam, but I had playfully chosen 'a tooth of Ho Chi Minh's' as about equally offensive from an American standpoint and rather more comical...

...more important, it fails to acknowledge that the r e s t of Nabokov's paragraph is a direct comparison of the two works, and in fact, the alteration of past tense to present ("found" to "find") makes hash of that comparison, since Nabokov refers consistently to only the novel in the present tense, with the play relegated to the past...

...I I _9 assigned to U.S...

...First, economic man acts so that the marginal costs of his activities axe equal to their marginal benefits...

...now let us look at his way with fairly clean typescript...

...Of course, "broadly enough" may be so all-encompassing that the theory loses all predictive value...

...and your s~gnature The Foreign Service Institute's _9 Spanish course is unconditionally guar- IB anteed...

...Students from thirty years ago at the University of Virginia remember his affected manner, his cigarette in its long holder, his disciples (parading the same cigarette holder) who thought editing a great science instead of a minor art...

...Such characters in Dead Souls as the innservant or Chichikov's valet (who had a special smell of his own which he imparted at once to his variable lodgings)do not quite belong to that class of Little People...

...also Imay's cas~ argo...

...Simply, anyone interested in nineteenth-century Russian literature, one of the real glories of world literature, should read them...

...and that with, say, Melville, Borges, and T.S: Eliot he shared a love of literary reference...

...In How to Win Arguments he freely shares the stories of some of his triumphs (and disappointments) with us...

...And yet . . . when I recently--needless to say, with the greatest reluctance-became involved in some disputes involving my personal affairs, and I attempted to apply the authors' wisdom to these, I found it almost totally useless...

...Perhaps he thought d i f f e r e n t l y of these lectures, which a f t e r all do represent the detritus of public occasions...

...I Its by far the most effective way to learn Diners dub) by enclosing card number...

...She recalls that, while Ronald Reagan doesn't look much like Hitler, "various political scientists have suggested that if fascism comes in America it will be a 'friendly fascism.'" Like Margaret Fuller, spunkily deciding to accept the universe, Betty Friedan has chosen to admit a few basic truths about human nature...

...It became a job for experts...

...The interviews created a mythical earlier Nabokov, an ideally austere teacher who perhaps confounded his later avatar when he opened that Pandora's box of old classroom lectures...

...If you're not II convinced ~t's the fastest, easiest, mosl pain- mE less way to learn Spanish...

...Bullish on Braces?~--" F~ dmss/t)u~mm...

...Two results spring from these assumptions...

...Cohn's is the more practical of the two books...

...I have seen only praise for Bowers's editing of these two volumes, the first on Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, and Stevenson," the present one on Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Gorky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev...

...world literature underpinned the late, enormous Ada...

...This brings me to my f i r s t p o i n t . " After this we can only imagine what Bowers has done in his efforts not to "improve" those obscure and written-over notes that constitute most of Nabokov's lectures...

...Two hundred years of studying markets has produced a coherent, Kenneth Stein is a free-lance wrT"ter who works in Cambm'dge but lives in New York...

...MasterCard...

...The discussion of The Seagull has more bite...

...Many other FSl language courses also I available Wnte us I I i intoa"teaching machine...

...At this superhigh level of art, literature is of course not concerned with pitying the underdog or cursing the uDDerdo~ It anneals to that secret denth television host, a fabled fire-breather of liberal bent...

...But surely Roy Cohn realized long ago that his brand of street wisdom cannot be transmitted through a how-to book, even as William Rusher knows that the publication of How to IVin Arguments will not inspire the spawning of Rusherian advocates across the Republic...

...Perhaps at this point we should remind ourselves of Bowers's statement of principles in his Introduction: The e d i t o r of a r e a d i n g e d i t i o n may be permitted to deal more freely with inconsistencies, inadvertent mistakes, and incomplete inscription, including the need sometimes to add bridge passages in connection with quotation...

...They sprawl over many more c e n t u r i e s , the number of masterpieces is formidable--and this brings me to my first point...

...2 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1982 remember that in the Gogol section a famous textual editor was not painstakingly p6tting together a mosaic from old fragments of glittering tile, but merely reprinting a portion of an earlier text over which his author had originally exercised editorial control...

...By the e~a ol the course youH be _9 _9 learning and speaking entirely ~n Span~sh~ This course turns your cassette player set bp.eak bpanlsh like a diplomat...

...Why was this so...

...The Bible says that the meek shall inherit the earth...

...I wouldn't have missed any of it...

...I am reminded of the occasion, for some reason not mentioned in How to IVin Arguments, when Rusher invaded my home precinct in Detroit in order to do battle with a local imprecise), "Tell me, Mr...