Customer Reviews

Lectures on Russian Literature

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Imagine you attend Cornell, you smart devil you. You wander into the Lit class and a hawk-browed very serious tall man with glinting eyes leans out at you over the faded wooden podium. Behind him on the blackboard are a maze of drawings, dates, crisscrossing lines and circles. You look again at your syllabus - Russian Literature in translation. The black bell above the door rings, the tired muted clatter of a halting iron clanger. A rustle of books, restless students, and dead air from the closed winter storm windows rises up for just a second, then, hovering in the room shrinks to silence. The teacher begins,
"Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. Leaving aside his percursors Pushkin and Lermentov, we might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy; second, Gogol; third, Checkov; fourth, Turgenev. This is rather like grading student's papers and no doubt Dostoevski and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks."
So begin the lectures on Anna Karenina. By the time Nabokov is done you will know more than you thought possible about the novel. You'll be comfortably familiar with the inside of an 1872 Russian railroad passenger car traveling as the night express between Moscow and St. Peterburg. To help you picture it, Nabokov draws a highly detailed sketch, with the position of each occupant, doors, windows, stove; even the direction of travel is rememebered.
Wonderful as all this is, for sheer incandescent brilliance, no essay on any work in Russian Literature by any critic comes close to Nabokov's examination of Gogol's Dead Souls. Unlike Nabokov's own listing of Russian prose masters, he also comes in second as well as first, with the fulsomely captivating essay on Anna Karenina. The others offer a cross between a kaleidoscope's rendering of the fantasy behind the dummy facades with the exactitude born out of years of scientific reading.
Nabokov's particular and unique genius treats us with a plethora of acute and uncanny observations, viewpoints derived from the closest possible scrutiny of the works. No book compares in this field - a marvel!

Nabokov is a native of world literature. So it is no surprise that as he is taking the reader on a guided tour of his land, his strong literary opinions easily navigate centuries and continents of literary landscape. However, being an emotional as well as scholarly narrator, Nabokov naturally gravitates to his favorite corners of the world. He is a guide giving a tour of his native city and adding more intimate detail and color when talking about the streets where he grew up. Russian literature must occupy a very special place in his heart, since it permeated his Russian childhood, his longing for which he so beautifully described in "Speak, Memory". In "Lectures on Russian Literature", Nabokov is noticeably closer to the Russian writers than he is to the European writers in his previous volume, "Lectures on Literature" (itself very enjoyable). His spectrum of vision is wider, embracing multiple works of a writer and his personal qualities. The resulting picture is richer, the contrasts of the temperaments and styles make the writers stand out: Chekhov's altruism and Turgenev's vanity, Gogol's impressionist colors and Gorky's clichés, Dostoevsky's cold reason overwhelming his art and Tolstoy's "mighty" art "transcending the sermon", the believable and coherent worlds of Chekhov or Tolstoy and Dostoevsky's internally contradicting world or Gorky's "schematic characters and the mechanical structure of the story"...

Here Nabokov continues his thought that a writer is mostly a creative artist, rather than a historian or philosopher. This is how he summarized Gogol's desperate attempts to collect facts for the second part of "Dead Souls": "[Gogol] was in the worst plight that a writer can be in: he had lost the gift of imagining facts and believed that facts may exist by themselves" (Gogol was asking his friends to supply him with descriptions of life around them which he could use in his art). Contrast with it Nabokov's admiration of Chekhov's writing for being so true to life. Chekhov invented his characters, but did it so well that they naturally created a coherent world. Nabokov always put imagination and style at the top of the writer's arsenal, and much above any "reality" (which he always mentioned in quotation marks).

Nabokov clearly prefers characters to reveal themselves rather than be explained by the author: for example, where Chekhov let his characters act (not surprisingly, Chekhov was a great playwright), Turgenev tended to over-explain. In "Fathers and Sons", he uses epilogue to describe what happened next in the story. In the scene where Bazarov's father embraces his wife "harder than ever", Turgenev feels the need to explain that this happened because "she had consoled him in his grief". For the same reason Dostoevsky, whose characters Nabokov sees as "mainly ideas in the likeness of people", was not one of his favorite authors. Primacy of idea over form and style was anathema to Nabokov. Both Turgenev and Dostoevsky were too visible on the page for his taste.

Personal style of a writer enjoys a special consideration throughout these lectures. While Chekhov is presented as a master of light touch, of suggestion, Dostoevsky appears repetitive, dogmatic, hurried and over-working. As an illustration, Nabokov points out that to set up the murder in "Crime and Punishment" the author needed a whole confluence of circumstances: "Raskolnikov's poverty, self-sacrifice of his sister and utter moral debasement of the intended victim".

Nabokov believes that literature should not be gulped, but "taken and broken into bits, pulled apart, squashed", gradually releasing its flavors. One could hear a master chef admiring the virtues of spice freshly crushed in a mortar. His obvious delight in attending to the minute flavors of the novel makes his lectures so enjoyable and unique.

This work presents no overall theoretical structure in regard to the reading of Russian literature. What makes it so valuable is the brilliant insights into the work of Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevski,Tolstoy, Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. These are the observations not of a literary critic but of a fellow writer and creator.
A few gems:
" Both Gogol and Ivanov were constantly pestered by impatient people rebuking them for their slowness; both were highstrung,ill- tempered, uneducated, and ridiculously clumsy in all worldly manners."

"One will observe a queer feature of Turgenev's structure. He takes tremendous trouble to introduce his characters properly , endowing them with pedigrees and recognizable traits, but when he has finally assembled them all, lo and behold the tale is finished and the curtain has gone down whilst a ponderous epilogue takes of whatever is supposed to happen to his invented creatures beyond the horizon of the novel."

"Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. Leaving aside his precursors Pushkin and Lermontov , we light list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy, second, Gogol, third, Chekhov, fourth Turgenev. This is rather like grading students papers and no doubt Dostoevski and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks."

Several of the other reviews have this product confused with another book (Lectures on Literature). The contents of this one (Lectures on RUSSIAN Literature) are:

Nikolay Gogol: Dead Souls; "The Overcoat"

Ivan Turgenev: Fathers and Sons

Fyodor Dostoevski: Crime and Punishment; Memoirs from a Mousehole; The Idiot; The Possessed

Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenin; The Death of Ivan Ilych

Anton Chekhov: "The Lady with the Little Dog"; "In the Gully"; Notes on The Seagull

Maxim Gorki: "On the Rafts"

Three Essays: Philistines and Philistinism; The Art of Translation; L'Envoi

Man a class with him must have been wild.

Nabokov carries the student through all of the major writers after Pushkin except Lermontov. (Maybe Pushkin was a different class?)

Whether you agree with his attacks on Turgenev's lack of realism while respecting Gogol's fancifulness, or if you find Dosktoevski more important and more interesting than Nabakov does, you will still enjoy this assemblage of lectures.

His coverage of Anna Karenina might ruin the book for anybody who hasn't read it, but is brilliant.

I would suggest any reader of the Russian classics pick this one up.

I bought this book hoping to find great insights into the work of my favorite Russian authors. In particular I had just finished Anna Karenina. I am huge fan of Nabokov. I adore many of his books. Pale Fire and Lolita are two of my favorite novels ever, but this collection of his lectures was fairly disappointing. It was thin on insight (there were a few) and long on retelling of the the plots. It's almost like a Nabokov cliff notes. Not what I was hoping for.