Simon Karlinsky
NABOKOV'S LECTURES
ON RUSSIAN LITERATURE
According to a story known at departments of Russian lit–
erature on many American campuses, Vladimir Nabokov was at
one time considered for a professorial appointment by a major East
Coast institution of higher learning. During the discussion of his
candidacy, a distinguished Russian-born scholar objected that one
does not hire a major Russian writer to teach Russian literature, just
as one does not invite an elephant to teach a course on elephants.
Both the objection and the example seem capricious. Noted artists,
poets, and composers are often hired by universities as teachers on
the strength of their proven achievements. As for elephants, an
articulate and communicative one, if such could be found, would be
a definite asset to a course devoted to the study of its species. And
articulate and communicative was precisely what Vladimir Nabokov
was in his capacities as critic, literary translator, and eventually
teacher and literary scholar.
A younger contemporary of Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam,
and Marina Tsvetaeva, Nabokov was exposed to the same symbolist
and postsymbolist literary currents of the last prerevolutionary dec–
ade that formed the outlook of these three great poets. Like them,
Nabokov rejected the utilitarian and ideological approach to litera–
ture that dominated Russian culture at the end of the nineteenth
century, and he also shared their respect for craftsmanship and their
interest in the verbal texture of literary works. Some of his other atti–
tudes, however, such as his contempt for the neoclassicism of the sev–
enteenth and eighteenth centuries in general, and for most Russian
writers who antedated Pushkin in particular, have more in common
with nineteenth-century utilitarianism than with Russian modern–
ism of the early twentieth century.
It
was in the non-Russian surroundings of Cambridge
University that Vladimir Nabokov settled down to a systematic
study of his native literature, prompted, as he tells us in both the
This article is an abridged version of the introductory essay commissioned for
Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature.
At the request of Mrs. Vera Nabokov. it did
not appear in the book.
