Mainly for fans and students of tha Nabokovian oeuvre
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Vladimir Nabokov's approach to European literary masterpieces is both funny and enlightening. Of special interest for the uninitiated into the Nabokovian world view are the essays "Good Readers and Good Writers" and "The Art of Literature and Commonsense". But beware: if you want to read a straight academic approach to the writers treated in this book you have chosen the wrong book. Some of Nabokov's comments are fantastic, especially his reading of Flaubert and Proust are exceptionally good, but they are not wissenschaft in the traditional manner. These lectures say more about Nabokov the writer than they say about other writers.
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Nabokov begets pom-poms for the great classics of yore
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Nabokov plunges straight into the texts of some of literature's finest moments, with the sole reminder to his audience not to relate with a particular character or circumstance, but rather the author's sheer genius and mastery over form, vision, and artistry. Of course such an obsession to the virtuosity of the "enchanter" can be limiting in itself, yet let us cast aside such doubts and take solace in the merry classroom of Nabokov's fresh jive. ----- "'To take upon us the mystery of things' - what King Lear so wistfully says for himself and Cordelia - this is also my suggestion for everyone who takes art seriously. A poor man is robbed of his overcoat; another poor fellow is turned into a beetle - so what? There is no rational answer to "so what." We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answers to sensations that you can neither define, or dismiss. Beauty plus pity - that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual." ----- While only skimming the shimmering surfaces of each creation, Nabokov's lectures nevertheless inform and delight throughout. The style is warm, playful, and encouraging. I would particularly recommend this primer to those curious yet uncertain individuals to whom the vast and shady world of "literary masterpieces" seems as likely to enlighten as it is to brainwash with page after page of pretentious, verbal extravagance and dull moral predicament. This is a valid suspicion and too often the case in some of the perceived classics of literature. But coming from Nabokov, who has himself taken such short-comings and transformed them into brilliant reading in its own right ('Pale Fire'), this selection of works is deserving and, I believe, likely to satisfy the novice and experienced reader alike. These timeless books are new languages to be learned, forgotten trails to be rediscovered; so that the imagination might be free to converse with greater ease to that boisterous group of private voices, with their armoured rhymes and heady ardor. ----- "Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences." As in all of his work Nabokov leaves his interpretations open-handed, aloof and free of any sense of responsibility (despite the straightforward delivery the Nabokov smirk is still alive and kicking throughout). He's had his say; let the works stand on their own two feet. Our humble lecturer justly points out that if these creations don't appeal to his little hunters of culture, well then, there are always other worlds to turn to, other thrills to be found in life. If this isn't your cup of tea than like Nabokov's own literary creation, Professor Timofey Pnin, one can always travel up on the road into "the soft mist where hill after hill made beauty of distance, and where there was simply no saying what miracle might happen."
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