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 Anna Karenin is itself a work of art.
Perhaps the most valuable contribution that Nabokov made to his students was not merely his emphasis on shared experience but on shared informed experience. As a creative writer himself he could meet the authors he treated on their own ground and make their stories and characters come alive by his own understanding of what constitutes the art of writing. In his persistent emphasis on intelligent reading he found that nothing equalled the reader's command of detail as the key to unlock the secret of how masterpieces work. His commentary notes on Anna Karenin are a treasure of information that enhances the reader's awareness of the inner life of the novel. This scientific yet artistic appreciation of detail, characteristic of Nabokov himself as a writer, constitutes ultimately the heart of his teaching method. He summed up his feeling as follows: "In my academic days I endeavored to provide students of literature with exact information about details, about such combinations of details as yield the sensual spark without which a book is dead.* In that respect, general ideas are of no importance. Any ass can assimilate the main points of Tolstoy's attitude toward adultery but in order to enjoy Tolstoy's art the good reader must wish to visualize, for instance, the arrangement of a railway carriage on the Moscow-Petersburg night train as it was a hundred years ago." And he continued, "Here diagrams are most helpful."*
So we have his blackboard diagram of the crisscross journeys made by Bazarov and Arkadi in Fathers and Sons, and his drawing of the layout of the sleeping car in which Anna journeyed from Moscow to Petersburg on the same train as Vronski. The dress that Kitty would have worn skating is reproduced from a contemporary fashion illustration. We have discourses on how tennis was played, what Russians had for breakfast, luncheon, and dinner, and at what times. This scientist's respect for fact combined with the writer's own understanding of the intricate trails of passion that inform a great work of imagination is quintessentially Naboko-vian and is one of the particular virtues of these lectures.
*
On this passage John Simon remarks: "But Nabokov does demand, for all his rejection of crude reality—'those farcical and fraudulent characters called Facts'—a powerful semblance of reality, which, as he himself might have put it, is not the same as a re semblance. As he said in an interview, unless you know the streets of Joyce's Dublin and what the semi-sleeping car on the Petersburg-Moscow express looked like in 1870, you cannot make sense of Ulysses and Anna Karenin[a]. In other words, the writer makes use of some specific realities, but only as bait with which to trap the readers into the greater unreality—or greater reality—of his fiction. " ("The Novelist at the Blackboard, " The Times Literary Supplement [April 24, 1981], 458.) Of course, if the reader does not understand and assimilate this detail, he remains outside the imaginative reality of the fiction. It is quite true that without Nabokov's explanation of the conditions under which Anna traveled on that fateful journey to Petersburg certain of the motifs in her nightmare cannot be understood. * Strong Opinions, pp. 156-157.
7
Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature
This is the teaching method, but the result is a warm sense of shared experience between Nabokov and the hearer-reader.
One reacts with joy to his communication of understanding through feeling, a gift given particularly to critics who are themselves great literary artists. That the magic he felt so keenly in literature should be aimed at pleasure we learn from these lectures and from the anecdote that at the first meeting of Literature 311 in September 1953, at Cornell, Vladimir Nabokov asked the students to explain in writing why they had enrolled in the course. At the next class he approvingly reported that one student had answered, "Because I like stories."
E d i t or i a l M et h o d
The fact cannot and need not be disguised that the texts for these essays represent Vladimir Nabokov's written-out notes for delivery as classroom lectures and that they cannot be regarded as a finished literary product such as he produced when he revised his classroom lectures on Gogol for publication as a book. (The Gogol essay published here is excerpted from Nikolai Gogol [New York: New Directions, 1944].) The lectures exist in very different states of preparation and polish, and even of completed structure. Most are in his own handwriting, with only occasional sections (usually the biographical introductions) typed by his wife Vera as an aid to delivery. The degree of preparation ranges from the handwritten rough notes for the Gorki lecture to a considerable amount of typed material for Tolstoy that seems to have been planned as part of an extended general introduction to the lectures on Anna Karenin reworked as a textbook. (The appendices to the Anna Karenin essay consist of material prepared for Nabokov's edition.) When typing exists the text was usually further modified by Nabokov, who might add fresh comments by hand or revise phrases for felicity. Thus the typed pages are likely to run a little more smoothly than the handwritten. The holograph pages on a few occasions appear to be fair copies, but normally they give every indication of initial composition, and they are often much worked over both during the writing-out and on review.
Some separate sections in the lecture folders clearly represent simple background notes made in the initial stages of preparation and either not utilized or else considerably revised and incorporated subsequently into the lectures themselves. Other independent sections are more ambiguous, and it is not always demonstrable whether they reflect stages of amplification during the course of repeated delivery in different years and in different places from the basic Wellesley series (seemingly not much modified, except for Tolstoy, when delivered later at Cornell) or else jottings for possible incorporation in a future revision. Whenever possible all such material not manifestly background and preparatory memoranda has been salvaged and worked into the texture of the discourse at appropriate places.
The problem of making a reading edition from these manuscripts falls into two main parts: structural and stylistic.
Structurally, the main order of delivery, or the organization of the lectures on any one of the authors, is not ordinarily in question, but problems do arise, especially in the Tolstoy lectures, which are composed of a series of discrete sections. The evidence appears to be quite contradictory, for example, whether Nabokov intended Anna's story to be finished before he took up in any major way the Lyovin narrative with which he proposed to conclude, or else whether the plot line of Anna and Vronski was to begin and to end the series, as presented here. It is not entirely clear, also, whether Notes from Underground (i.e., Memoirs from a Mousehole) was intended to end the series of lectures on Dostoevski or to follow Crime and Punishment. Thus even in an essay like that on Anna Karenin in which at least some preliminary preparations looking toward publication can be encountered, the proposed organization is in some legitimate doubt. The problem is intensified in the lecture on "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," which exists only in the form of a few fragmented notes. Between these two extremes comes a series like that on Chekhov, which is only partly organized. The section devoted to "The Lady with the Little Dog" is fully worked out, but "In the Gully" is represented only by rough notes with directions to read certain pages from the story. The Seagull handwritten manuscript was discovered apart from the rest but appears to belong to the series.