Reading with Nabokov

...Almost as a subplot in the lectures, good and bad readers are divided in the same fashion...

...Nabokov is good at Tol-stoyan dreams...

...He is similarly adept at spotting those "delightful artistic touches" he loves: Fenichka's infected eye in Fathers and Sons, or the moment when Gurov sees his lady's little dog again and in his excitement forgets its name...

...The painful meditations on freedom that "Mouseman" lashes out with do not legitimately burn for characters, according to Nabokov, despite his declaring at the start of the course that students should value "real books written by free men for free men to read...

...he wages a campaign to slander their opponents, whom he would have us see as the lumbering ideologues, the slobs of "message...

...This leaves him free to be as witty and rude and inequitable as he needs...

...And his students are always expected to be aware of his true calling, fiction...

...Further on, Nabokov instructs students to dismiss Lyovin's thoughts at the very end of the novel...

...His critical apparatus might not travel well, and they probably could not duplicate his own fine choices using his terms alone...

...By way of compensation, the biographies of these two writers are among the best in the book...

...Between these two camps there can be no peaceful coexistence...

...Nina's fragile understanding at the end of The Seagull gets dropped...

...Nabokov not only glorifies his heroes...

...Much of the pleasure in these lectures comes from Nabokov's ever-graceful play of mind and the sparkle-a favorite term he applies to others-of his words: Tolstoy is "tiger-bright," Chekhov's literary style "goes to parties clad in its everyday suit," Russian literature is "all contained in the amphora of one round century, with an additional little cream jug provided for whatever surplus may have accumulated since...

...Perhaps this is intentional strategy, as if he were saying "Listen to this, and love...

...When he turns to the character's evolution, however, things don't go as well...

...Malraux was not...

...He helps restore to the study of Russian literature a much needed, indeed crucial sense of high craft in language, of all that's iridescent on its pages...

...In specific readings of works, where he pursues the special effects of enchantment, Nabokov is superb...

...Tur-genev was "the first of Russian writers to notice theef feet of broken sunlight...

...Possibly his disdain is designed to browbeat his matriculated listeners into excellence, away from the notion of literature as "simple...

...It is the gesture of the thought alone, rather than the ideas, that is significant...

...Literature is not a pattern of ideas but a pattern of images...

...It was Gogol (and after him Lermontov and Tolstoy) who first saw yellow and violet at all...

...Reviewed by Anne Frydman Contributor, the "New Yorker...

...he crosses his legs with an eye upon the color of his socks...

...The notes and comments vary in significance-I confess the railroad carriage diagram didn't take me anywhere-but everything contributes toward imagining a world very different from our own...

...Similarly, in the discussion of Dostoevski's "Notes from Underground" ("Memoirs from a Mousehole") Nabokov repeats three times that the ideas in Part I should not be bothered with...

...There is also a Gogol lecture that comes out of three chapters of Nabokov's 1944 Nikolai Gogol...

...Assistant Professor of Russian Literature, SUNY at Purchase Here is a book of extravagant joys and judgments that we were never meant to have in its present form...

...Dostoevski, for instance, is scorned- " Just as I have no ear for music, I have I regret no ear for Dostoevski the Prophet"-and Nabokov announces that he's eager to "debunk" him...

...Stevenson admired Dostoevski and very likely stole from him...

...He pays special attention to how Anna Karenin moves in a race of couples through time, with Lyovin and Kitty going for the perfect marriage, and takes delight in deciding who are the first- or second-rate artists in The Seagull, Treplev or Trigorin, Nina or Ar-kadina...

...and once he and his father met Tolstoy on the street...

...The problems of social man and the process of a character's inner life did not concern Nabokov either, and with these screened out the topography of several of the works examined seems level...

...He arrived here in 1940, an expatriate writer and displaced aristocrat...

...With the help of Vladimir Nabokov's wife and son, Fredson Bowers, who edited the first volume of teachings on the art of fiction, Lectures on Literature, has lovingly wrested from notes the great prose master's idiosyncratic appreciations of Turgenev, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorki, philistinism, translations, and good readers...

...Hyde, a work lauded in the first volume of lectures...

...In addition, he may have felt that the general enthusiasm for the novel of ideas-literature read for its sociopolitical or psychological content, very different from his own-threatened to leave him underrated as an artist...

...The Lectures are thus valuable as a work of cultural translation...

...The most forgiving epithet for the bad sort is "inexperienced," then the more scorching "civic-minded" and ultimately the fully-damned " philistine, "who reads for the fable rather than the "tone and tint," or "poetical intonation...

...Intentional or not, this may have been in part his reaction to the literary climate of America in the early 1940s...

...Art is a divine game," he instructs...

...Eluding these lectures, however, is a sense of what makes 19th-century Russian letters at least comparable to the plays and epics of ancient Greece...

...His criteria for merit, "enduring art and individual genius," are most often presented as givens: "As you know by now, I' m not one to go heavily for the human interest stuff...

...Yet his method serves him personally as well...

...the eyes and gusts of wit are resurrected...

...Chekhov was "the first to rely so much upon the undercurrent of suggestion to convey a definite meaning...

...he refused to curb his criticism of the Soviet Union, then our ally...

...Turgenev's Rudiri), since he either redid or approved of the translations...

...As a teacher, Nabokov's authority opens from his persona...

...The tone changes...

...The real dominance of the first person here comes not so much from the frequency of Nabokov's asides as from their tone and the casually dropped instructions they contain about what to value and who he is in the world of letters...

...No doubt Nabokov was so much a product of the great Russian tradition that he saw no need to discuss its moral assumptions...

...not to seek information about Russia in a novel but "a specific world imagined and created by individual genius...

...The resulting pages read beautifully...

...A good translator must be able to impersonate the real author's "tricks of demeanor and speech...

...many an old lime-tree-alley, gold-dark and sweet-smelling, with a glimpse of emerald light at its end...

...Another assumption is his own worthiness as a subject: "No biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life...

...Passages that he admiringly cites- some of them very long-are lent a Na-bokovian sheen...

...Unfortunately neither Nabokov's terms nor his brilliant touches reach at why...

...Not just open about his likes and dislikes, Nabokov requires strict obedience to his criteria, and the classroom becomes a little kingdom, on the model of Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana...

...Nabokov uses family connections to diminish the remoteness of Russian writers, too: One of his ancestors commanded the Peter-and-Paul Fortress at the time Dostoevski was imprisoned there...

...in the melodrama department Nabokov finds Stevenson in good taste, though, while Dostoevski is in "bad taste...

...True as this may be, the character's ideas nonetheless have a bearing on his actions, fears, desires...

...In that light, the prominence of his classroom "I" was less a matter of course and more a feat of trompe I'oeil, or trompe I'oreille: Nabokov spoke in the voice of a master secure in his literary eminence, as he would be and not as he was...

...In fact, although it has no place in Nabokov's readings in general, the relation of ideas to action and moral judgment connects the two parts of "Notes...

...He ignores the dramas of conscience and judgment that make literature very powerful, and even subversive on occasion...

...The breakthrough of realization and love, the"first," forGurovin "The Lady with the Little Dog" is reduced to the flattest paraphrase...

...or maybe he is trying to follow the author's technique of leaving meaning implicit...

...Interestingly, the dualism of good and evil that so preoccupied Dostoevski did not bother Nabokov in Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr...

...With the expert eye of a fellow artisan, Nabokov picks out his subjects' flaws, ranging from Turgenev's botched description of Bazarov's beetle collecting expedition to the forgotten paperweight Smerdyakov used to kill old Fyodor in The Brothers Karamazov...

...Tolstoy's invention of the interior monologue for the scene of Anna's carriage ride before she commits suicide antedates Joyce's stream of consciousness, Nabokov notes, and there is a fine passage on the importance of the childbirth scene in Anna Karenin to the history of world literature...

...In effect, this is a virtuoso reading of Russian literature, keenly alert to the "firsts" of perception and technique...

...Through the bad reader he mocks every critic who might undervalue his kind of art...

...Students who heard these lectures at Wellesley and Cornell in the 1940s and '50s can now share their happiness with the reading public, whose enthusiasm for Nabokov's novels enabled him to do a disappearing act from the rostrum and American shores...

...After he quotes the last pages of Fathers and Sons, Nabokov's only remark is, "Fate takes over but still under Turgenev's direction...

...Gorki is beneath debunking: "He tried to perfect his style, poor man...

...He could recognize true art, and he could produce it: Still, by turning his esthetic into a classroom polemic he risked doing his students some disservice...

...what matters is Lyovin's "state of bewildered grace" (a beautiful phrase that could also apply to Dmitri Karamazov after he dreams of "the babe," if Nabokov were not adamant that Dostoevski characters don't change...

...that the writer is first of all an enchanter...

...Almost all the readings of the beautifully chosen short stories disappoint...

...Ideas do not matter much in comparison to a book's imagery and magic...

...From here it is a short hop to bad critics, who talk "about books rather than within them...

...Admirable" heads his many labels for the good reader, followed by "experienced," "creative," "artistic," and finally "the reader...

...Although he insists that "Steve" Oblonski is the novel's M.C., Nabokov impersonates a first-person narrator who finds places for students to stand and watch, who introduces them to first-class railroad carriages, clockmen calling weekly, varieties of oysters, tufts of flowers in a lady's hair, and preferred velvet for a ball...

...Whatever the case, Nabokov's mere commendation cannot do justice to the cumulative experience of the fiction...

...Anna suffers from her "filthy, soul-stunting sin...

...From this familiarity Nabokov taught his students to dispense with awestruck reverence, insisting that writers are mortals who may create immortal prose...

...Jekyll and Mr...

...The Anna Karenin chapter is full of stunning explications of images, starting with the glass tables and singing ladies of Oblon-ski's dream...

...So will the remarks on lines in the original...

...Of course, Nabokov was alive to the culture he was translating into- surely his choice of "Mouseman" as a name for Dostoevski's Underground Man was meant for American ears...

...Responding to a letter from Edmund Wilson acclaiming Malraux's Man's Fate, Nabokov wrote in 1946: "The longer Ilivethemorel become convinced that the only thing that matters in literature is the (more or less irrational) shamanstvo of a book, i.e...

...He calls "The Overcoat" the greatest Russian short story, "Lady" among the greatest ever written, and "The Death of Ivan Ilych" the greatest of great short stories, "the most artistic, most perfect, most sophisticated achievement...

...He offers odds and ends of personal memories and bits of research, for example, to enhance Tolstoy's details of the upper class-to which his own family belonged before the Revolution...

...lor the literature of other kingdoms, lite kind he fell obliged to wage war on...

...their manner of expression is what reveals the narrator...

...A system of encouraging the good ones and shaming the bad begins in the introductory lecture, where Nabokov describes the struggle in 19th-century Russia that pitted the government against social-minded utilitarian critics: Both sought to damage the free expression of genius, and Nabokov concludes by exhorting his students to avoid such paths-not to read for general ideas but for particular vision...

...This approach has another side to it, an alternate cast of villains let's say, just as the book' s pleasures have corresponding disappointments...

...In his discussion of Anna Karenin- the highlight of the book-he almost seems ready to jump into the novel himself...

...The pattern of the lectures-praise, long quotation, no commentary-also tends to frustrate...

...By urging students to look at literature in terms of artistic problems that require successful sleights-of-pen to be resolved, Nabokov brings a competitive spirit to his discussions of the works...

...Nabokov treats only the enchanted reader and the private showing of the artist and his art...

...Then, too, he promoted some unearned contempt (distant cousin of sentimentality...

...The vividness of language will be of service to those who do not know Russian...

...Whimsical in a manner reminiscent of the exiled Russian critic Andrei SinyavDecember 14, 1981 sky (who has also written books on Pushkin and Gogol), Nabokov responds to writers in ways that make them resemble characters in one of his novels: "When Turgenev sits down to discuss a landscape, you notice that he is concerned with the trouser-crease of his phrase...

...he knew the critic who married Dostoevski's mistress...

...This is the vehement heart of the esthetic throughout the lectures...

...Of Gogol Nabokov says, "Before his and Pushkin's advent Russian literature was purblind...

...These lectures were produced, after all, early in Nabokov's career as a writer of English, before he acquired the great reputation...

...Yet Lyovin's reflections and unresolved questions do echo backward through the novel, Nabokov's strictures notwithstanding...