The immediate and amazing success of Lolita when the novel was published in the United States in 1958 – which Nabokov himself, in the guise of John Shade in Pale Fire, compared with one of these hurricanes that sweep the East Coast from Florida to Maine – offered him an unexpected financial windfall and allowed him to abandon the long career as a university teacher which had been his main source of income.
But, to get there, Vladimir Nabokov had to tread a most tortuous path. Born in St. Petersburg into a wealthy aristocratic family, after the Bolshevik Revolution, in 1917, he was forced to leave behind the mansion where he was reared like a prince and the idyllic manor where he spent the summers. Having taken refuge in Crimea, the family, after the defeat of the White Army had to flee to Western Europe, settling first in England (where the author studied at the University of Cambridge and played soccer as a goalkeeper) and later in Berlin, where he lived beginning in 1922. Married to Véra, a Jewish woman, Hitler’s absolute power and antisemitism obliged the couple, taking with them their only child Dmitri, to move to France in 1937, where they stayed until 1940 when once more they were forced to escape due to the imminent takeover of the country by the Nazi forces.
This gruesome description of the many forced migrations of Nabokov explains why, at the age of 41, he arrived penniless in New Yok in a rundown cargo ship and, with the help of some friends, was finally able to obtain a position teaching comparative literature at the Wellesley College. He stayed there until 1948, when he started teaching Russian and European literature at Cornell University, where he had some famous students, such as Ron De Lillo and the future associate justice of the Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who always praised the author as a major influence on her development as a writer.
Nabokov as a teacher cut a special figure even before he opened his mouth. A handsome and corpulent man, with a stentorian voice and a strong Russian accent, he would arrive in a car driven by Véra, who then crossed the campus carrying the books that were to be used during the lecture and served as Nabokov’s assistant, sometimes even writing on the blackboard what her husband dictated. Some people may have believed she was trying to guarantee that the enthusiasm of the young female students would not go farther than the limits of the classroom, but the fact is that Véra was Nabokov’s great partner since the hard times in Berlin, when she was the true breadwinner of the family working as a secretary in a patent office while the author gave occasional lessons of French, English, tennis, boxing and prosody. A brilliant intellectual herself, Véra managed her husband’s life because she knew she had married a literary genius who should have all the opportunities to manifest his talent without getting involved in day to day activities.
Fortunately, thanks to the careful recovery of the classroom notes, decades later we are able to enjoy his teachings and understand why he used to say that “great novels are above all great fairy tales.” Or, more clearly: “Literature was not born the day when a boy crying ‘wolf, wolf’ came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying ‘wolf, wolf’ and there was no wolf behind him.”
I had the good fortune of translating into the Portuguese spoken in Brazil Lectures on Literature, Lectures on Russian Literature and Lectures on Don Quixote. In the first of these books, we are taken to an unforgettable promenade along the literary high peaks of three languages with Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park; Charles Dickens’s Bleak House; Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Marcel Proust’s The Walk by Swann’s Place; Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis; and James Joyce’s Ulysses. In the second, the excursion, no less magnificent, visits the works of six major Russian masters: Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. John Updke wrote the brilliant introduction to these two books, his wife having been one of the many students enchanted by Professor Nabokov at Cornell. The third book concentrates on Cervantes’ masterpiece and offers us a totally original critical vision of this precursory novel.
The lectures make clear Nabokov’s controversial ideas regarding literature and also art in general. In his own words: “Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. Let us not kid ourselves: Let us remember that literature is of no practical value whatsoever, except in the very special case of somebody’s wishing to become, of all things, a professor of literature.”
The self-mocking is typical, but this comment undoubtedly shows Nabokov’s flat rejection of the notion that novels should convey a social or political message, that they may serve to teach something to its readers. On the contrary, in his opinion all that the reader should aspire to is the aesthetic pleasure which requires that he must “caress the details, the divine details. In high art and pure science, detail is everything. We must see things and hear things, we must visualize the rooms, the clothes, the manners of an author’s people.” And that is why Professor Nabokov would draw on the blackboard the ground plan of the gardens of Mansfield Park, the distribution of rooms in Gregor Samsa’s apartment (Kafka’s character that, according to Nabokov, had turned into a huge beettle and not a cockroach), the house, with two entrances in different streets, where the respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll and his vile alter ego Mr. Edward Hyde lived.
Still more relevant were the details of the plot, the very architecture of the story. In the words of the Professor: “My course, among other things, is a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures.” And in a more incisive way: “It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then, with a pleasure which is both sensual and intelectual, we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.”
The apparent paradox of mentioning the precision of poetry and the intuition of science, instead of poetic intuition and scientific precision as conventional logic would require, stems from Nabokov’s profound interest in nature, in his conviction that science and art participate in a permanent process of mutual pollinization. That’s why, while beginning to gain some literary reputation as a writer due to the short stories and poems appearing in important magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, Nabokov would combine his lectures at Wellesley College with the job of de facto curator of the butterfly collection in the Museum of Comparative Zoology of Harvard University. Although his articles on Lepidoptera were appreciated by some experts, the fruits of his passion for butterflies, begun in childhood and influenced by his father, were only duly recognized when his theories about a species of blue butterflies known as Polyommatus were confirmed well after his death. Morevover, his works and careful drawings had a major impact in saving from extinction the blue Karner butterflies, a species found in Upstate New York. These efforts also contributed to the passing of the federal Endangered Species Act in 1973.
That’s why we may say without fear of contradiction that, following in the footsteps of the unparalleled polymath Leonardo da Vinci, Nabokov represented a nexus between art and science, which once more was beautifully expressed by him: “Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.”
More than teachings on literature, Professor Nabokov’s lectures are a great life lesson since “existence is but a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.”
By Jorio Dauster