Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature: Portraits of the Artist as Reader and Teacher by Dhooge Ben (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 769 notes, modern Russian crime writing — such as Boris Akunin’s series about fin-de-siècle detective Ernst Fandorin — looks back to its nineteenth-century origins in order to continue tackling questions of authority and truth in a society where legal decisions are often stranger than fiction. University of Exeter Muireann Maguire Dhooge, Ben and Pieters, Jürgen (eds). Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature: Portraits of the Artist as Reader and Teacher. Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics, 62. Brill Rodopi, Leiden and Boston, MA, 2018. ix + 226 pages. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $127.00. This volume features critical readings of some of Vladimir Nabokov’s lectures, including those on Austen, Cervantes, Chekhov, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, and Stevenson. Nabokov’s monograph Nikolai Gogol is also given consideration. The volume originated in part from a conference on Nabokov’s lectures at the Royal Academy in Brussels. Following an introduction, the volume’s chapters are divided into three parts: ‘Part 1: Teacher among Authors’, whose essays evaluate Nabokov’s approach to the texts he taught; ‘Part 2: Critic among Critics’, which focuses on the materials and sources Nabokov used; and ‘Part 3: Author among Authors’, whose essays tease out how Nabokov’s own aesthetics and literary works resonate with the texts featured in his classes. Many of the essays accomplish all of these tasks to some extent (and unfortunately, none of them bestow upon Nabokov a grade for his efforts). In part one, Yannicke Chupin connects Nabokov’s observations on Proust’s prismatic style of characterization to Nabokov’s own conception of character developed in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Lolita. Nabokov’s focus on the ‘visual quality of Proust’s poetics and characterization’ is at the exclusion of the ‘strong linguistic identity and the voices of Proust’s characters,’ amounting to a ‘partial analysis’ of Proust’s work that is guided largely by Nabokov’s own aesthetic proclivities (pp. 32–33). Luc Herman finds that Nabokov’s misogynistic judgments dominate his analysis of Austen; consequently, Nabokov often misreads Mansfield Park, mistakenly conflating author, narrator and protagonist. Ilse Logie argues that Nabokov’s moralistic reading of Don Quixote results in a misreading of the novel’s cruelty. And yet, following Krabbenhoft, Logie concludes that this misreading evolves into a rewriting of Don Quixote — that is, Lolita. Vivian Liska suggests that the flaws in Nabokov’s Kafka’s lecture may otherwise be understood as evidence of the story’s enchanting effect upon him, as ‘symptoms of his own unsettling encounter with Kafka’s story’ (p. 62), while Flora Keersmaekers locates parallels between Nabokov’s ideas about good reading and Jean Rousset’s (‘they share a view on SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 770 the goal of reading: utter and complete identification with the consciousness of the author’ [p. 78]), and then compares their readings of Madame Bovary. In part two, Geert Lernout argues that Nabokov benefited from writing about Joyce’s Ulysses in a time before Joyce studies truly took off, and points out original insights Nabokov makes that professional Joyce scholars would later affirm. Arthur Langeveld considers the sources Nabokov used to compose Nikolai Gogol, arguing that Nabokov selected details from Veresaev’s biography to present a distorted portrait of a maladjusted Gogol´, and that the monograph operates less as an objective study and more as a vehicle through which Nabokov grandstands his own views. Ben Dhooge strives to locate the sources Nabokov used when composing his Chekhov lecture, identifying a study by William Gerhardi as the likely fount of many of Nabokov’s claims. In part three, Lara Delage-Toriel argues that Nabokov’s interest in Madame Bovary can be explained by a number beliefs he shared with Flaubert, ‘among which [was] a common endeavor to give precedence to the beauty of art over its moral implications’, and a ‘rejection of the social importance of fiction’ (pp. 172–73). Roy Groen demonstrates that Proustian aesthetics have not only played a role in Nabokov’s novels, but also guide his prescriptions for good reading. He analyses a passage in Proust that, he argues, gives rise to ‘the central element in the aesthetics underlying Nabokov’s approach to...