VLADIMIR NABOKOV: LECTURES ON LITERATURE Edited by Fredson Bowers; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 385 pages; $19.95
"All satisfied with their seats? O.K. No talking, no smoking, no knitting, no newspaper reading, no sleeping, and for God's sake take notes." So began Literature 311-312 at Cornell in the '50s, Professor Nabokov presiding. Teaching was of necessity Nabokov's livelihood in those pre-Lolita days, and he took to it as he took to all the shifting fortunes of his long émigré life: with energy, flair and an unfailing relish for the ironies of the situation. Somewhere in one of those classes, as Nabokov might have guessed, was at least one future novelist, Thomas Pynchon. Somewhere in his own imagination glimmered at least two future academic portraits, the title character of Pnin and the poet John Shade of Pale Fire.
Meantime from the podium he projected another character of his own creation, the cosmopolitan, eccentric lecturer: authoritarian but also authoritative, alternately mock-stern and mischievous (he sometimes started over in mid-lecture, to see how long it would take the class to notice), arrogant yet never harsh, in fact downright kindly at times. After explaining that the transformed Gregor Samsa in Kafka's The Metamorphosis was not a cockroach but a beetle, and that beneath his carapace he possessed unsuspected wings, Nabokov told his students: "This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings."
No collection of Nabokov's lectures and notes could fully recapture the flavor of his professorial persona, but Lectures on Literature comes as close as one could hope for. Elegantly edited by Fredson Bowers, handsomely printed in an oversized format, it includes discussions of seven classic European and English novels and is extensively illustrated with Nabokov's drawings, diagrams, maps, floor plans and marginal annotations ("Idiot!" he scrawled typically next to one of the many mistranslations that outraged him).
At Cornell, wrote Biographer Andrew Field, "Nabokov belonged to the department of Nabokov." Just as well, considering the cheerful contempt for critical orthodoxies that resounds through these lectures. The whole historical and sociological dimension of Dickens' Bleak House, he announces, "is neither interesting nor important." He dismisses Freudian interpretations of The Metamorphosis by saying, "I am interested here in bugs, not in humbugs." As for character study in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, "the worst way to read a book is childishly to mix with the characters in it as if they were living people." Great works of art, for Nabokov, are not so much versions of the real world as new worlds unto themselves, "supreme fairy tales" whose essential harmony and radiance are self-contained and self-sufficient.