SIMON KARLINSKY
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English and the Russian versions of his autobiography, by his fear of
forgetting or contaminating the cultural heritage that connected him
to the native land he no longer hoped to see. The extent to which
Russian literature permeated the memories of his stay at Cambridge
is shown in the description of his activities as a goalkeeper at soccer
matches, which in the Russian autobiography (but not in the
English one) is studded with references to Chekhov, Turgenev, and
Pushkin.
Quite early, Nabokov began to hybridize his fiction and poetry
with his literary studies. His three verse plays of
1923-24
and his
comedy
The Event
(1938)
are rich pastiches of themes and textual
reminiscences from nineteenth-century Russian authors.
The Gift
(1938)
is both a novel and a compressed literary history of nine–
teenth-century Russia. During Nabokov's American period, this
trend was to find its culmination in
Pale Fire
and
Ada,
both of which
put the methods of literary research and scholarship in the service of
telling the novel's plot. Just as the narrative in
Pale Fire
took the form
of annotations to a long poem, the four-volume edition of Pushkin' s
Eugene Onegin
offered a quirky and idiosyncratic translation of this
novel in verse as a pretext for a study of Pushkin's language and
style couched in the form of footnotes.
The recently published lectures on Russian literature were pre–
pared for Nabokov's courses in Russian and in comparative litera–
ture taught at Wellesley College and Cornell University. Those were
the years
(1941-58)
when he wrote
Bend Sinister, Lolita,
and
Pnin
and
also did a number of literary translations and studies. Both as critic
and as teacher ofliterature, Nabokov was not interested in establish–
ing literary developments as an historical continuum. Literary
schools and influences were of no importance as far as he was con–
cerned. References to secondary sources are minimal in his lectures
and the choice of these sources seems haphazard, as when he sup–
ports a point on Dostoevsky by citing the famed anarchist Prince
Peter Kropotkin's
Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature,
a compen–
dium of nineteenth-century cliches and
idees re{:ues,
or draws on
Alexander Roskin's propagandistic book for children,
From the Banks
of the UJlga,
for biographical information on Gorky. What Nabokov
cared for was the individual writer and the individual work. In his
survey course, the students were given just enough historical back–
ground on a given period to enable them to concentrate on a close
study of a particular masterpiece stemming from that period.
Nabokov's view of literature was formed, as already men-
