Lectures on Literature

Rating:
Summary: This is an extremely good book!
Review: As an English major, I had a lot of "lit-crit" shoved down my throat -- and I found a lot of it tedious.

THIS book is something anyone can read for the sheer pleasure of it. The play of Nabokov's mind in the company of these master artists is just great.

Rating:
Summary: Get the hardcover edition
Review: As the other reviewers write, this is a great literary companion, especially to Ulysses. Nabokov writes wonderfully. I can imagine that most people would read this book as they read Mansfield Park, Madame Bovary, Bleak House, etc and would flip back and forth. However, my paperback copy was very poorly bound and fell apart. So my advice is get the hardcover edition.

Rating:
Summary: Get the hardcover edition
Review: As the other reviewers write, this is a great literary companion, especially to Ulysses. Nabokov writes wonderfully. I can imagine that most people would read this book as they read Mansfield Park, Madame Bovary, Bleak House, etc and would flip back and forth. However, my paperback copy was very poorly bound and fell apart. So my advice is get the hardcover edition.

Rating:
Summary: Keyword is Literature
Review: For western people Russia still seems too exotic to distinguish details. By this cause "Russian Literature" often is heard as something like "Japan theatre". This book is true guide into most developed Russian art represented with 3 greate (Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov) and 3 other popular (Dostoyevskiy, Turgenev, Gorkiy) writers.
If you are interesting into souvenirs you don't need to read these lectures. But if you usually read Dickens or Joyce and want to continue your investigations then Nabokov's guide is what you exactly want. It is not for tourists. Keyword is not Russia, but Literature.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: In his opening lecture, Nabokov says, " ... great novels are great fairy tales -- and the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales." The tales discussed are Austen's "Mansfield Park," Dickens' "Bleak House," Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," Proust's "The Walk by Swann's Place," Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," and Joyce's "Ulysses." In addition, there are lectures "Good Readers and Good Writers," "The Art of Literature and Commonsense," and "L'Envoi" -- the first being his opening and the last being his closing comments on the course. These are lectures not polished by Nabokov for publication. There is a companion volume on Russian literature.

The examination of the works here is purely literary. The works are examined in minute detail. For example, in "The Metamorphosis," Nabokov goes to some length to determine what insect Gregor became. Not a cockroach, as some suggest, but rather a beetle. And he draws pictures. He wants us to understand the layout of the rooms in the Samsa flat. The devil -- that is, the art -- is in the details. Some might object that there is more to some of these works than is discerned by such a point of view. Granted, but nothing precludes looking elsewhere for (say) a more philosophical treatment of "The Metamorphosis," or God forbid, thinking about it on one's own.

In his closing comments, Nabokov says, "In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys -- literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author -- the joys and difficulties of creation. We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter."

Rating:
Summary: you guys are reviewing the wrong book
Review: just a correction: Nabokov wrote two different books "lectures on literature" and "lectures on Russian literature." most reviewers here are talking about the wrong book.

Rating:
Summary: In Summary:
Review: just a correction: Nabokov wrote two different books "lectures on literature" and "lectures on Russian literature." most reviewers here are talking about the wrong book.

Rating:
Summary: Pull up a chair
Review: These lectures given by Mr. Nabokov at Cornell in the 50s and 60s are so faithfully transcribed complete with doodlings and scratchings that one can visualize the author amid a squadron of freshly scrubbed sophomores inquiring whether anyone managed to stay awake through the first 500 pages of Bleak House. Immediately coming through here is the time and effort given by Nabokov in putting these lectures together as well as his obvious enthusiasm, knowledge and intelligence for his subject matter.

The substantive content, while helpful, especially to a dabbler in literature as myself, lucid, well given, and well constructed, was somewhat disappointing perhaps more due to my own expectations than any deficiency in the work itself. Nabokov immediately limits himself by noting that any ass could decipher the opinions of the various authors on the important questions of the day, and that he, Nabokov, would confine his comments to plot, structure and style. Good as far as it goes for such authors as Austen and Stevenson, but for me a purely mechanical approach with such as Kafka, Dickens and Joyce, where it seems to me to omit where these fit into a philosophical, psychological, or historical framework ignores much of the value of their work.

So, rather than comments on the beginnings of existential literature which I peceive in Bleak House, we get a Nabokov almost totally transfixd by plot with some limited ad hoc comments about structure and style, which, while interesting, are also basically useless, both because Nabokov fails with any consistent approach from work to worik, but also because the comments lack any kind of comparative analysis relating to e.g. quality, artistry or ability.

Neverthless, Nabokov certainly is excellent in his explanation of plot of six well known works. We get maps of Dublin, a drawing of the rooms in Metamorphosis, a schematic of the position of various characters at the parties of Mansfield Park, as well as the author's own selected passages to illustrate the construction of the story--all of which aid in understanding especially adding to what we might have missed in our own reading. To be fair, Mr. Nabokov does occasionally make comments regarding any perceived merit or deficiency in the works, e.g. when absorbing Ulysses one might be questioning the rave reviews of that particular work, and indeed Nabokov here and there hints at certain shorcomings in Joyce as a writer and Ullysses as a great book. But this type of more penetrating analysis is much too rare for lectures given by a noted author, noted professor of literature at an Ivy League school. All in all, interesting, glad we read, but incomplete work by this charismatic literary personality.

Rating:
Summary: In Nabakov's case ' observations are literature'
Review: This work presents no overall theoretical structure in regard to the reading of Russian literature. What makes it so valuable is the brilliant insights into the work of Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevski,Tolstoy, Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. These are the observations not of a literary critic but of a fellow writer and creator.
A few gems:
" Both Gogol and Ivanov were constantly pestered by impatient people rebuking them for their slowness; both were highstrung,ill- tempered, uneducated, and ridiculously clumsy in all worldly manners."

"One will observe a queer feature of Turgenev's structure. He takes tremendous trouble to introduce his characters properly , endowing them with pedigrees and recognizable traits, but when he has finally assembled them all, lo and behold the tale is finished and the curtain has gone down whilst a ponderous epilogue takes of whatever is supposed to happen to his invented creatures beyond the horizon of the novel."

"Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. Leaving aside his precursors Pushkin and Lermontov , we light list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy, second, Gogol, third, Chekhov, fourth Turgenev. This is rather like grading students papers and no doubt Dostoevski and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks."



Rating:
Summary: In Summary:
Review: What you don't feel, you won't hunt down by art,
Unless it wells from your own inward source,
And with contentment's elemental force
Takes sway of every hearer's heart.
Just sit there, pasting joints to members,
Concoct from others' feasts your hash,
And blow a puny glow of embers
Up from your little heap of ash!
From minds of babes and apes you may be coining
Tribute of awe, if this be what you seek;
But never heart to heart will you be joining
Unless you let your own heart speak.

--Faust,534-545(Trans. Walter Arndt;Norton Critical Edition)

Happy reading!