Six Masters, Seen By a Seventh

By Paul Gray

LECTURES ON RUSSIAN LITERATURE by Vladimir Nabokov

edited by Fredson Bowers; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 324 pages; $19.95

Most classroom lectures die with the clanging of a bell. The captive audience departs, some members perhaps carrying away scribbled notes to be puzzled over just before the final exam. The teacher who wants to live any longer than that in student memories had better be unusually vivid, opnionated or brilliant.

Vladimir Nabokov was all three.

Those who heard him at Wellesley and Cornell during the 1940s and '50s had no way of knowing that their emigre instructor would become world famous, thanks to a child named Lolita. They did recognize him as a spellbinder. Word of mouth about his classes coalesced into legends.

Young people signed up with him to study fiction but wound up taking Nabokov.

This book preserves what remains of Nabokov's long-ago lectures on six Russian writers: Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Gorky, Tolstoy and Turgenev. It is an altogether fit companion to Lectures on Literature, the collection of his talks on European authors that was published to high praise last year. Editor Fredson Bowers, who assembled both volumes, has done a commendable job of bringing mismatched parts (typescripts, handwritten pages, random jottings) into a coherent whole. The result is not the book that Nabokov would have written. So fastidious about his own words that he conducted interviews in writing, the author would probably have given these lectures a thorough scrubbing before airing them in print. He surely would have noticed contradictions: he calls Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich "that greatest of great short stories" and Gogol's The Overcoat the "greatest Russian short story ever written." He would have excised repetitions and pared down exhaustive quotations.

Such revisions might have produced a book that is more polished and persuasive; they might also have eliminated a good deal of idiosyncratic fun.

Nabokov the teacher assumes that his charges know little about 19th century Russia and its writers. So he provides chronologies and thumbnail biographies, often enlivened by impish detail: "He [Gorky] tramped on foot all over Russia, to Moscow, and once there made straight for Tolstoy's house. Tolstoy was not at home, but the Countess invited him into the kitchen and treated him to coffee and rolls. She observed that a great number of bums kept coming to see her husband, to which Gorky politely agreed." Nabokov does not mind inserting himself into his descriptions of his homeland: "Petersburg the sophisticated, cold, formal, fashionable, and relatively young capital where some 30 years later I was born."

He assumes center stage in other ways. He not only imparts information but hectors and cajoles students into seeing it his way. He sternly warns them against using fiction as a magic casement with a good view of reality: "If you expect to find out something about Russia . . . if you are interested in 'ideas' and 'facts' and 'messages,' keep away from Gogol."

He preaches constantly that novels and stories should be "about" nothing but themselves: "The word, the expression, the image is the true function of literature. Not ideas."

Yet 19th century Russian fiction is a minefield of philosophies and factual details; watching Nabokov the aesthete tiptoe across this densely packed ground is one of the book's chief entertainments.

He frequently courts disaster. He condemns Dostoyevsky because it "is questionable whether one can really discuss the aspects of 'realism' or of 'human experience' when considering an author whose gallery of characters consists almost exclusively of neurotics and lunatics." Hands and voices are raised, or should have been, reminding the professor that such Issues are supposed to be irrelevant when discussing art. Nabokov inches back, just in time. Dostoyevsky misses being a great writer "I repeat, not because the world he creates is unreal--all the worlds of writers are unreal--but because it is created too hastily without any sense of the harmony and economy which the most irrational masterpiece is bound to comply with..."

Nabokov is very good on Tolstoy, Gogol and Chekhov, whom he deems the best fiction writers that 19th century Russia produced. He is better still on Vladimir Nabokov, born 1899. To read his criticism of others is to learn more about Ada, Lolita, Pale Fire and the rest. Like most great authors, he transforms the objects of his study into emblems of his art.

--By Paul Gray

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