As
political tensions mounted in Europe, Vladimir Nabokov secured his May
1940 exit from Paris with the promise of a summer stint teaching
creative writing--primarily drama--and Russian literature that summer at
Stanford University, in California. After supporting himself and his
family for nearly two decades tutoring in language and literature, and
failing to find a more stable teaching post in England, it was less than
he had hoped for. But he was optimistic: by the time of his arrival in
the United States he had prepared more than 100 lectures in anticipation
of a steady income to be derived from university teaching.
Following
the summer in Palo Alto, California, he spent an enjoyable and
productive year at Wellesley College, in Massachusetts, as a
writer-in-residence, a post that allowed him a good deal of free time to
pursue his own literary ideas as well as lepidopterological work. He
began making frequent trips into Cambridge, to Harvard's Museum of
Comparative Zoology. At the end of the 1941-2 academic year, he moved
his family to Cambridge and became a research fellow at Harvard, earning
a modest salary. Forced to supplement this income with occasional
satellite lectures, he wrote to Edmund Wilson in frustration: "Funny--to
know Russian better than any living person--in America at least--and
more English than any Russian in America--and to experience such
difficulty in getting a university job. I am getting rather jittery
about next year."
From his native tongue: lectures on Russian literature
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| Nabokov's European Fiction Class | |
| According
to his biographer Brian Boyd, the course at Cornell in which Nabokov
lectured on a small selection of "supreme masterpieces"--Literature
311{A150}312: Masters of European Fiction--was the most popular academic
offering on campus, "eclipsed in student number only by Pete Seeger's
folk-song class." But Nabokov was driven to distraction by the infelicities and inaccuracies that plagued many of the standard translations, which he was forced to assign to his students at Cornell. For example, at the first Madame Bovary lecture, he would take charge: "So before placing in your innocent hands this book, let me give you a list of the worst mistranslations to be corrected in the first 60 or so pages ..." | |
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Wellesley
College continued to provide increasingly welcome teaching
opportunities, though his post was not made permanent. In 1943, Nabokov
offered a non-credit course in elementary Russian at Wellesley, and the
following year became a lecturer in Russian. The translations he had
prepared for his Stanford and Wellesley classes soon grew into
publication projects. He adapted lectures on Gogol's "The Overcoat" and Dead Souls into a study published by New Directions in 1944; the Lermontov, Tyutchev and Pushkin translations comprised Three Russian Poets,
published soon after. The translation of Pushkin into English would
become an active lifelong goal for Nabokov. By the fall of 1946, he was
able to add to his agenda a course in Russian literature in translation,
and had two years of experience with those lectures before Cornell
University wooed him away with promises of a more substantial post, as
head of the Russian department--a department that failed to materialize
during the decade he spent at the university.
Nabokov made his
home in Ithaca, New York, from the fall of 1948 through January 1959,
with an occasional hiatus. His first courses were surveys of Russian
literature, in the original and in translation, including works by Leo
Tolstoy (Anna Karenina, "the supreme masterpiece of nineteenth-century literature," and "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"), Nikolay Gogol (Dead Souls and "The Overcoat") and sometimes Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (Fathers and Sons). In 1949 he began an Aleksandr Pushkin seminar, which required a good deal of his own translations of Eugene Onegin.
In his adopted language: lectures on literature
In
1950 Nabokov gave his first lecture for Literature 311-312, Masters of
European Fiction, a course that would grow from a modest enrollment of
several dozen students in its first year to become the second most
popular course at the university in his final term. He delivered his
last lecture in Ithaca on January 19, 1959.
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| NYPL, Berg Collection |
 In
his copy of Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," Nabokov retranslated
virtually the entire work interlinearly; on this page, he has depicted
the beetle into which Gregor Samsa metamorphoses. |
Stories
of Nabokov's presence on campus and his lecture style have grown beyond
local legend. Cornell alumni recall Nabokov's wife, Véra, as a near
appendage to the professor--she passed out papers, wrote notes on the
"gray board," graded papers, held his office hours and, in extreme
circumstances, delivered his lectures, which she read carefully from his
prepared manuscripts. Fredson Bowers, the editor of the published Lectures on Literature and Lectures on Russian Literature,
observes that Véra, having performed those functions, likely made
routine editorial decisions in preparing several of Nabokov's typescript
versions for publication after her husband's death.
Nabokov was a
favorite teacher of many who attended Cornell, and his lectures were
often overflowing with students. Although his demeanor was often gruff,
he was not a hard grader. When he returned tests, he was taken with
reading out the grades of those who received a 90 or above and would ask
them to come to the front of the class. About tests he once stated: "I
shall give you tests, because study without monitoring is like writing
on water."
Nabokov taught the same authors and books for nearly a decade, almost without exception: Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Charles Dickens (Bleak House), Jane Austen (Mansfield Park), James Joyce (Ulysses), Franz Kafka ("The Metamorphosis"), Robert Louis Stevenson ("The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde") and Marcel Proust (Swann's Way).
Bowers notes that "Nabokov was prohibited from teaching American works
at Cornell because he was not a member of the English Department."
 NYPL, Berg Collection | In
1969, Nabokov told an interviewer, "Instead of perpetuating the
pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter
headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom's and
Stephen's intertwining itineraries clearly traced." Nabokov drew just
such a map as part of his lecture notes for Ulysses. |
Embedded
in the text of the published lectures themselves is Nabokov's
philosophy that one must teach books, not ideas. Two of the best-known
examples of this philosophy in action are his diagram of the paths of
Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through the streets of Dublin for
Joyce's Ulysses, and the anatomy of the Gregor Samsa domed beetle
for Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." Nabokov had planned to include many
academic anecdotes in the final installment of his memoir, the
unrealized Speak On, Memory; among the notes that survive are his
instructions to students to separate from their comrades during exams,
to write in ink and not to plan to use the bathroom if they haven't
brought a doctor's note.
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| Reading List for Nabokov's Classes | | |
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Nabokov
offered a volume of his lectures to Viking Press in the course of
negotiations in 1951 for other works, negotiations that ultimately came
to nothing. In 1954, he began actively revising some of the lectures
with an eye to their publication, but a decade passed before he offered
them to Putnam's. Finally, in 1972, they were included as part of his
second McGraw-Hill contract--though he had recently added a note to his
archive that read, "My university lectures (Tolstoy, Kafka, Flaubert,
Cervantes, etc. etc.) are chaotic and sloppy and must never be
published. None of them!" That contract was nullified by his death, in
1977; Véra and Dmitri took on the task of assembling the lectures from
notes, manuscripts and typescripts, and they were eventually published
by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1980 and 1981.
Despite the rewards of teaching, Nabokov repeatedly lamented its necessity. In 1951, Véra wrote to New Yorker
fiction editor Katharine White that her husband was having "probably
the worst year of his life and though he derives much pleasure from his
big course and from the students' reaction, the necessity to neglect his
writing often makes him feel miserable." He himself wrote to Edmund
Wilson, "I am sick of teaching, I am sick of teaching, I am sick of
teaching."
But he did not immediately resign his Cornell post in the wake of Lolita's
American success in 1959. He requested a semester's leave and, fully
expecting to return in the fall, stored many possessions locally before
sailing for a European sojourn. But the demands of his newfound
international fame, coupled with his own ambitious projects, proved too
much. After almost a year in Los Angeles working on the Lolita
screenplay (of which Stanley Kubrick used only a small portion in his
film), Nabokov, who had given his last university lecture at Cornell,
and his wife would live out their remaining years abroad, settling into
the Montreux Palace Hotel in the fall of 1961.
Rodney Phillips, Sarah Funke
