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Lectures on Literature: Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Stevenson

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In his opening lecture, Nabokov says, " ... great novels are great fairy tales -- and the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales." The tales discussed are Austen's "Mansfield Park," Dickens' "Bleak House," Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," Proust's "The Walk by Swann's Place," Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," and Joyce's "Ulysses." In addition, there are lectures "Good Readers and Good Writers," "The Art of Literature and Commonsense," and "L'Envoi" -- the first being his opening and the last being his closing comments on the course. These are lectures not polished by Nabokov for publication. There is a companion volume on Russian literature.

The examination of the works here is purely literary. The works are examined in minute detail. For example, in "The Metamorphosis," Nabokov goes to some length to determine what insect Gregor became. Not a cockroach, as some suggest, but rather a beetle. And he draws pictures. He wants us to understand the layout of the rooms in the Samsa flat. The devil -- that is, the art -- is in the details. Some might object that there is more to some of these works than is discerned by such a point of view. Granted, but nothing precludes looking elsewhere for (say) a more philosophical treatment of "The Metamorphosis," or God forbid, thinking about it on one's own.

In his closing comments, Nabokov says, "In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys -- literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author -- the joys and difficulties of creation. We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter."

I would like to thank reviewer Bruce Kendall for pointing out this book to me. This is a great book.

By the way, I have one reservation about this book: it has seven chapters, one on each of seven novels, and do not read a chapter on one of the seven novel until you have read the novel. He gives lots of details and it will ruin your reading experience. Just read one novel at a time and then read Nakobov's lecture notes on that particular novel. The only exception might be "Ulysses" where most readers need help and often use a reading guide. He gives a very detailed analysis of the plot and characters for all seven works, and for one book - "The Metamorphosis" - the comments are almost as long as the 55 page story.

It would be quite an experience if one could sit in on the classes of say Saul Bellow in Chicago in the 1930s and 40s when he taught literature. He recommended Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Lawrence, Joyce, and Dreiser, among others. Anyway, this is the next best thing. It is the course notes with an introduction by John Updike on the course taught by Nabokov at Cornell around 1950 or so.

He was born in Russia but learned English and French at an early age. His father was murdered in Russia, and was carrying a copy of Madame Bovary at the time of his death.

He went to university in England but then lived in Germany for 15 years, and then came to the Boston area where he taught at Wellesley College as just an Assistant Prof. teaching Russian 201, a survey of Russian literature. He worked simultaneously at Harvard for about 10 years, but not in literature. He then got a position as Associate Prof. of Slavic Literature at Cornell.

Nabokov's main love was literature, but since he was not in the English Department, he could not teach American literature, so he gave courses on European literature. This book outlines course material prepared by Nabokov for courses 311-312, Masters of European fiction.

If you read this book, it is similar to taking his course. His approach is to examine a small number of books and look at each great detail. There is lots of analysis plus some sample exam questions at the back of the book.

His seven books are:

Jane Austen - Mansfield Park

Charles Dickens - Bleak House

Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary

Robert Louis Stevenson - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Marcel Proust - The Walk by Swann's Place

Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis

James Joyce - Ulysses

This is an excellent lecture series prepared by Nabokov with his handwritten notes and sketches.

There is a note from him that he had more fun looking at the literature than the students. He was working on Lolita as he taught, and actually threw out the manuscript. His wife convinced him to continue and publish, and he was able to retire with the income from that book.

Some time back, I reviewed "Crime and Punishment" for Amazon. One of the commentators on my review suggested that I take a look at Vladimir Nabokov's critical analysis of Dostoevsky. So, via Amazon, I purchased Vladimir Nabokov's book, "Lectures in Literature." As luck would have it, this was not the volume covering Dostoevsky! However, I did take a look anyhow, my curiosity piqued by the comment on my review. The end result? A greater appreciation for Nabokov--and also a sense that I'm not apt to invest a great deal of time reading other of his literary analysis.

The essays in this book represent lectures that he gave at Wellesley College and Cornell University. The introductory comments note that (Page ix): "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 recognized as a finished literary work. . . ." John Updike's Introduction also provides some context for this work. He notes that Nabokov's lectures provide (Page xxv): ". . .a dazzling demonstration, for those lucky Cornell students in the remote, clean-cut fifties, of the irresistible artistic sensibility." He also notes, in Nabokov's words, the truth of novels, that (Pages xxv-xxvi): ". . .great novels are great fairy tales--and the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales. . . ." Nabokov himself points out that a writer can be considered as (a) a storyteller, (b) a teacher, and (c) an enchanter (Page 5). And, above all, he values style and structure in authors' creations.

Maybe a few examples will illustrate his critical approach. First, Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park." Let me confess. . . . I'm not particularly excited about Jane Austen's work. However, Nabokov is very pleased with her work. Given his emphasis on style and structure, he details how well she constructs this work. For instance, at one point, the characters, among whom there are a variety of tensions to begin with, select a play to perform. The decision as to which of the characters in Austen's story would play which characters in the play is well discussed by Nabokov. The play itself raises questions--it was, in fact, an actual play that scandalized some of the characters in the novel. And it exacerbated pre-existing tensions among the characters. All in all, Nabokov makes a great case that Austen's structure of this segment of the novel was well done indeed. And, in terms of style, he says of Austen that (Page 59) "she handles it with perfection." As noted, I am not much excited by Austen's works, but Nabokov sure convinced me that she was a terrific technical writer, who wed her genius to technique and style and structure to create something special.

Briefly, I would also note that his examination of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" leaves him cold. He does not think that it holds together well and that the dichotomy of the characters works well.

Finally, Kafka's "Metamorphosis," a story I read several decades ago. I recall the sense of despair I felt reading about the travails of Gregor Samsa--and a sense that, despite the awful/offal nature of the work that there was something important here. Nabokov is very positive about this piece. Much of this lecture is a simple description of the work, scene by scene, and Nabokov spennds some time noting how Kafka's work is so much better than Stevenson's work discussed above. Samsa's unexplained transformation into a beetle is the event that triggers this story. Nabokov notes how this tragedy has positive elements--a family finally getting its act together even as it abandons Gregor--and illustrates Kafka's style. Of the latter, Nabokov says (Page 283): "You will mark Kafka's style. Its clarity, its precise and formal intonation in such striking contrast to the nightmare matter of his story."

He concludes this set of lectures by congratulating his students on their work--and making a few final points. He concludes (Pages 381-382): "I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotion of the people in the book but the emotions of its author--the joys and difficulties of creation."

I admire his emphasis on style and structure, but I also think there is an almost sanitary quality about some of his observations. Austen? I have found it difficult over decades to get any purchase on her works. Her style and structure doesn't make up for what I feel as an overly mannered style (I expect to get hammered for saying that!). Does one really need to know about her knowledge of a particular play to appreciate (or not appreciate) her novel? I don't know. I'm a political scientist--not a literary critic. Nonetheless, this is an exciting book, as one learns how a literary critic from one critical perspective examining a series of works--Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, Stevenson, Proust, Kafka, and Joyce. If interested in Nabokov's critical perspective, this is a good starting point!

Nabokov plunges straight into the texts of some of literature's finest moments, with the sole reminder to his audience not to relate with a particular character or circumstance, but rather the author's sheer genius and mastery over form, vision, and artistry. Of course such an obsession to the virtuosity of the "enchanter" can be limiting in itself, yet let us cast aside such doubts and take solace in the merry classroom of Nabokov's fresh jive. ----- "'To take upon us the mystery of things' - what King Lear so wistfully says for himself and Cordelia - this is also my suggestion for everyone who takes art seriously. A poor man is robbed of his overcoat; another poor fellow is turned into a beetle - so what? There is no rational answer to "so what." We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answers to sensations that you can neither define, or dismiss. Beauty plus pity - that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual." ----- While only skimming the shimmering surfaces of each creation, Nabokov's lectures nevertheless inform and delight throughout. The style is warm, playful, and encouraging. I would particularly recommend this primer to those curious yet uncertain individuals to whom the vast and shady world of "literary masterpieces" seems as likely to enlighten as it is to brainwash with page after page of pretentious, verbal extravagance and dull moral predicament. This is a valid suspicion and too often the case in some of the perceived classics of literature. But coming from Nabokov, who has himself taken such short-comings and transformed them into brilliant reading in its own right ('Pale Fire'), this selection of works is deserving and, I believe, likely to satisfy the novice and experienced reader alike. These timeless books are new languages to be learned, forgotten trails to be rediscovered; so that the imagination might be free to converse with greater ease to that boisterous group of private voices, with their armoured rhymes and heady ardor. ----- "Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences." As in all of his work Nabokov leaves his interpretations open-handed, aloof and free of any sense of responsibility (despite the straightforward delivery the Nabokov smirk is still alive and kicking throughout). He's had his say; let the works stand on their own two feet. Our humble lecturer justly points out that if these creations don't appeal to his little hunters of culture, well then, there are always other worlds to turn to, other thrills to be found in life. If this isn't your cup of tea than like Nabokov's own literary creation, Professor Timofey Pnin, one can always travel up on the road into "the soft mist where hill after hill made beauty of distance, and where there was simply no saying what miracle might happen."

Excellent and brilliantly witty and dry series of lecture courses on literature from the master, Vladimir Nabokov. In this volume, Nabokov fights against all interpretive lenses, he denounces the sociological, political, and autobiographical perspectives on literature, arguing that a true reader should pay attention to the detail of the author's narrative, to the artistry and creativity, and not get drawn into banal generalizations. He writes that "the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales" (pg. 2).

According to Nabokov, good reader should:

1. Have an imagination

2. Have a memory

3. Have a dictionary

4. Have some artistic sense

In this volume, Nabokov lectures on a wide variety of great literature, including Jane Austin's `Mansfield Park,' Charles Dickens' `Bleak House,' `Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (an unusual choice at the time), `Madame Bovary' by Flaubert, Proust's great `a la recherché,' `the Metamorphosis,' by Kafka, `Ulysses,' by Joyce, and an excellent essay called `The Art of Literature and Commensense.'

This volume is filled with pleasurable surprises, especially the marvelous facsimiles of Nabokov's lecture preparations with complete annotations, and many wonderful diagrams and illustrations of the works analyzed. He has some great drawings of Gregor Samsa the beetle, and the floor-map of his apartment. It really helps the reader appreciate the work unlike the bulk of literary criticism, which seeks to mystify and empower the interpreter. This is a true appreciation of the novel form, and a classic of lit criticism from one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His depth and breadth of understanding and attention to detail will astound you.

Nabokov's ideas about literature will strike many readers as strange--his near obsession with seemingly trivial points of set description, his lack of interest in Great Ideas or in "character" in the sense of a window into human nature. Such readers would likely describe Nabokov's opinions (and his own artistic creations)as "disembodied," "narrow," "cold," "sanitary." These readers would be making a crucial error, selling both a brilliant artist and themselves short.

Narrative art generally operates as follows: an author presupposes the human world as a place driven by desire, a place defined by the striving for those things (white whale, justice for a father's fratricidal demise, "God") as grant freedom from pain and perhaps even transcendent joy. Drama unfolds as chracters fight over these things, great moral questions get asked (what are one's obligations to others as we strive, Does God care about us and our plans) and we feel kindred ecstacy and despair as characters near their objects or falter. To most, this is literature-- a chronicle of movement up and down a scale of nearness or distance from some highly charged, desired object. Indeed, to most, this is "reality," consciousness itself.

Nabokov has a very different idea. What Nabokov understands, what is central to his conception of literature (and of consciousness), is that those objects accepted by other writers as objectively powerful things capable (however complex their identities might otherwise be) of bestowing or denying happiness, have that power only because an indvidual consciousness gives it to them. While Humbert Humbert adores Lolita, homosexual chess partner Gaston Godin is so absolutely immune to her charms that he never even realizes she's one person (he "sees" multiple Humbert "daughters"). Charlotte adores dreadful Humbert because, contrary to what we know him to be, a gallant, handsome continental is the image she makes of him. In such a world, Nabokov's world, tragedy, the final, fatal estrangement from some ultimately longed-for object, has no place: What's a fall from grace when grace was never more than a dream of the mind? Suffice it to say, the "normal" critical values of literature become equally pointless. What DOES matter in this transmorgified world is style and structure, the artistry (the Samsa house, the layer cake in Madame Bovary) with which dreamy things, in art as well as in life, are woven. What seems shallow about Nabokov, is in fact far "deeper" and subtle than anything found in such alledgely "great souled" writers as Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Thomas Mann, etc. In fact, it's no exaggeration to say that Nabokov's art begins at a point higher than than where these writers' art, at its highest, finishes.

You shouldn't buy this book expecting to get amazing insights into every book addressed, or the beautiful, poetic words that Nabokov has gotten us used to. In my opinion, this book has a different charm (and purpose altogether), which is the enjoyable experience of reading great classics with a mastermind, an aesthete of the highest class. This book belongs in the shelves of those of us who would answer the question: "Who would you love to discuss books with?" with only one word: Nabokov.

These lectures given by Mr. Nabokov at Cornell in the 50s and 60s are so faithfully transcribed complete with doodlings and scratchings that one can visualize the author amid a squadron of freshly scrubbed sophomores inquiring whether anyone managed to stay awake through the first 500 pages of Bleak House. Immediately coming through here is the time and effort given by Nabokov in putting these lectures together as well as his obvious enthusiasm, knowledge and intelligence for his subject matter.

The substantive content, while helpful, especially to a dabbler in literature as myself, lucid, well given, and well constructed, was somewhat disappointing perhaps more due to my own expectations than any deficiency in the work itself. Nabokov immediately limits himself by noting that any ass could decipher the opinions of the various authors on the important questions of the day, and that he, Nabokov, would confine his comments to plot, structure and style. Good as far as it goes for such authors as Austen and Stevenson, but for me a purely mechanical approach with such as Kafka, Dickens and Joyce, where it seems to me to omit where these fit into a philosophical, psychological, or historical framework ignores much of the value of their work.

So, rather than comments on the beginnings of existential literature which I peceive in Bleak House, we get a Nabokov almost totally transfixd by plot with some limited ad hoc comments about structure and style, which, while interesting, are also basically useless, both because Nabokov fails with any consistent approach from work to worik, but also because the comments lack any kind of comparative analysis relating to e.g. quality, artistry or ability.

Neverthless, Nabokov certainly is excellent in his explanation of plot of six well known works. We get maps of Dublin, a drawing of the rooms in Metamorphosis, a schematic of the position of various characters at the parties of Mansfield Park, as well as the author's own selected passages to illustrate the construction of the story--all of which aid in understanding especially adding to what we might have missed in our own reading. To be fair, Mr. Nabokov does occasionally make comments regarding any perceived merit or deficiency in the works, e.g. when absorbing Ulysses one might be questioning the rave reviews of that particular work, and indeed Nabokov here and there hints at certain shorcomings in Joyce as a writer and Ullysses as a great book. But this type of more penetrating analysis is much too rare for lectures given by a noted author, noted professor of literature at an Ivy League school. All in all, interesting, glad we read, but incomplete work by this charismatic literary personality.

I got this because a former student was using it in a class. It's a collection of lectures Nabokov gave at Wellesley, where he taught for some years. Hard to imagine, but this excellent 20th century novelist was a very poor lecturer with (to me) a fairly naive critical eye. He goes on and on, for example, about the "genius" of RLS and Jekyll & Hyde, then dismisses Joyce's Ulysses with "he was a good writer." All in all, not a book for your Nabokov collection.

Nabokov writes about literature the way some write about wine: savoring nuances and discussing it with delight. A writer of elegant books and a scientist devoted to meticulous classification of detail, he could match Robert Parker's ability to rate 10,000 wines a year with his capacity of analyzing literary works. His illuminating writing is itself full of light and spark and makes his "Lectures on Literature" an esthetic experience.

In Nabokov's world, art fully defines a literary work. Here writer is an "enchanter" and a story teller, rather than historian, philosopher or instructor in any practical matter. His lectures are devoted to detecting the elements of style and structure in some of the most remarkable novels of European Literature.

One of these elements is symphony. Nabokov once confessed that he never found much pleasure in music. If we imagine for a second that he did, he probably would have preferred symphonies to chamber music and big band to jazz trio. He delighted in complex structures, where multiple parts fit neatly together: symphony of people in Flaubert's agriculture scene in "Madame Bovary", where "all the characters of ... book intermingled in action and in dialogue", symphony of simultaneous events in "Ulysses", symphony of senses in Proust's pairing of the visual and musical effects of moon light in "The Walk by Swann's Place", which he considered more complete and elegant than moon light's description in Gogol's "Dead Souls" where only visual perception is called to work.

Many other elements of personal style are noted: Dickensian imagery and word play, Proust's evolving sentences where A leads to B leads to C, the theme of layers in "Madame Bovary", variation of style in "Ulysses".

Nabokov's method of detecting these elements is to pay special attention to detail. The natural scientist in him believes that any general conclusion would develop naturally after the facts have been collected and taken in. Nabokov expected his students to draw street maps and family trees, visualize hairdos and notice the exact way one catches a coin tossed in the air.

Having answered the how of reading literature, Nabokov considers the why. The answer he offers is to acquire a taste for it. He believes that seeing the novel through its author's eyes, rising to the level of "the joys and difficulties of creation" is one of the most intense pleasures, and shares this pleasure with his students.