NABOKOV'S RUSSIANS
Date: October 25, 1981, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 3; Book Review DeskByline: By LEONARD MICHAELS; Leonard Michaels, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of ''The Men's Club,'' a novel.
Lead:
LECTURES ON RUSSIANLITERATURE By VladimirNabokov. Edited, With an Introduction, by Fredson Bowers. Illustrated. 324 pp. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $19.95
AFTER years of lecturing in universities, one of my colleagues was discovered bent over a Xerox machine making copies of his head. I once began a lecture and talked for several minutes before noticing that I was in the wrong room. I'd have noticed sooner if the students weren't taking notes.
It is difficult work, year after year, listening to your own voice. Nevertheless, some do it magnificently. One still hears remarks like ''I sat at the feet of Heidegger.'' Such abject adoration is a mysterious thing, a sort of religious phenomenon. Father Ong, the great literary scholar, has written an essay called ''Voice As a Summons for Belief.'' Something like this can be heard in the published lectures of VladimirNabokov. His voice summons us to a belief in high art.
Text:
The first volume, ''Lectures on Literature'' (1980), was received with much praise. The second, ''Lectures on Russian Literature,'' will be similarly received. It deals mainly with Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gorki. The lectures are very learned, very rich in critical insight, and often funny, but they are most extraordinary for the way Nabokov re-creates, in concrete sensuous detail, his experience of reading these Russian writers.
Fredson Bowers, who edited both volumes, says Nabokov's lectures were mainly handwritten. Sometimes they lacked clear organization, and parts remained in rough notes. Though Mr. Bowers has made them into excellently readable essays, you wouldn't appreciate his achievement if you believed Nabokov's remark in ''Strong Opinions'':
''Every lecture I delivered had been carefully, lovingly handwritten and typed out, and I leisurely read it out in class.''
This humorous pretension, or curious lie, is not entirely inconsistent with the lectures themselves, for it indicates a certain complexity in Nabokov's attitude toward matters of fact. In his Chekhov lecture, for example, he says:
''On the 2nd of July, 1904, he died far from his family and friends, amidst strangers, in a strange town.'' Nabokov was aware that Chekhov's wife claimed to be present and to remember, in poignant detail, the hours preceding Chekhov's death.Presumably, Nabokov doesn't believe her, and, with magnificent courtesy, chooses never to say as much, though he does say the marriage was unhappy.
It is also possible that Nabokov wants to believe in the ultimate isolation of artistic genius, somewhat as he wants to believe in the complete and careful preparation of every lecture he delivered. ''My method of teaching,'' he says in ''Strange Opinions,''''precluded genuine contact with my students.'' Genius is always alone, even in the classroom; certainly in the deathbed. Whatever the case, Nabokov definitely believes in the dialectical relation of reality and illusion. Discussing Tolstoy, he says:
''Some of you may still wonder why I and Tolstoy mention such trifles (historical data contemporary with the time in novels). To make his magic, fiction, look real the artist sometimes places it, as Tolstoy does, within a definite, specific historical frame, citing facts that can be checked in a library - that citadel of illusion.''
Given this notion of a library, a novelist might as well invent everything. More relevant is that Nabokov presents Tolstoy - a ''moralist'' who invented enormously yet resisted inventing - as someone who shares Nabokov's ontological vision, and, like him, captures the unreal in the very fabric of the real. But while Nabokov's word for fiction is ''magic,'' he tells us that, for Tolstoy, the word is ''Truth.''
''What obsessed Tolstoy, what obscured his genius, what now distresses the good reader, was that, somehow, the process of seeking the Truth seemed more important to him than the easy, vivid, brilliant discovery of the illusion of truth through the medium of his artistic genius. Old Russian Truth was never a comfortable companion; it had a violent temper and a heavy tread. It was not simply truth, not merely everyday pravda but immortal istina - not truth but the inner light of truth. When Tolstoy did happen to find it in himself, in the splendor of his creative imagination, then, almost unconsciously, he was on the right path. What does his tussle with the ruling Greek-Catholic Church matter, what importance do his ethical opinions have, in the light of this or that imaginative passage in any of his novels?''
If Tolstoy leans too far one way, maybe Nabokov leans too far the other way, but the difference between them doesn't prevent Nabokov from making Tolstoy similar to himself without, thereby, betraying Tolstoy. For example, on ideas in literature generally and in Tolstoy particularly, he says:
''... we should always bear in mind that literature is not a pattern of ideas but a pattern of images. Ideas do not matter much in comparison to a book's imagery and magic. What interests us here is not what Lyovin thought (as he watched a bug creep up a blade of grass) ... but that little bug that expresses so neatly the turn, the switch, the gesture of thought.''
This is a lovely perception, and, whether or not moral Tolstoy would agree, it feels true. In Nabokov's Gogol essay, excerpted from his book on Gogol and reprinted in the ''Lectures,'' he observes something similar to the above:
''The faceless saloon-walker ... is again seen a minute later coming down from Chichikov's room and spelling out the name on a slip of paper as he walks down the steps. 'Pa-vel I-va-no-vich Chi-chikov'; and these syllables have a taxonomic value for the identification of that particular staircase.''
Thus a physical action paralleling a mental action renders it kinesthetically. Nabokov's concentration on the poetics of superlative prose recalls his own prose. He does such Gogolian things himself.
My point is that Nabokov lectures in a very personal way. What he sees, he is equipped to see by virtue of his peculiar genius, and this gives special illumination and pleasure to his lectures. One also detects a faintly distorting pressure sometimes in his generalizations, which is again attributable to the personal note. For example, on Chekhov's technique:
''Exact and rich characterization is attained by careful selection and careful distribution of minute but striking features, with perfect contempt for the sustained descriptions, repetition, and strong emphasis of ordinary authors.''
Much of this description, even the phrase ''exact and rich characterization,'' and especially ''perfect contempt,'' seems more appropriate to the spirit of Nabokov's writing than to Chekhov's. Chekhov is always plain. It is ironically relevant to notice that Nabokov's writing is often thrilling in ''sustained descriptions'' and ''strong emphasis,'' but he is not by any means an ''ordinary'' author. ''
It is interesting, though probably meaningless, that while Nabokov says he is indifferent to anyone's praise or dispraise of his fiction, which he calls ''my circles, my special islands, infinitely safe from exasperated readers'' (''Strong Opinions''), he dispenses his own judgments liberally:
''... we might 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.''
Surely, in his dialectical imagination, Nabokov wondered what the great Russian artists might think of his work. If so, it occurred to him that Tolstoy and Chekhov would have found it objectionable, especially ''Lolita,'' a novel that Dostoyevsky - whom Nabokov virtually hates - would have hugely envied and perversely loved.
The joke about Dostoyevsky and Saltykov, however silly, touches on another of Nabokov's aversions - pedantic professorial distance. Literature must be taught, he believes, from within:
''... you may have seen, you must have seen, some of those awful text books written not by educators but by educationalists, by people who talk about books instead of talking within books.''
This notion of how properly to talk about books is repeated elsewhere. In the lectures on Tolstoy it is both insisted upon and demonstrated. First the insistence:
''Tolstoy keeps a keen eye on his characters. He makes them speak and move - but their speech and motion produce their own reaction in the world he has made for them. Is that clear? It is.''
It is? But, to insist it is ignores the difficulty of reconciling a novelist's artistic control with the freedom and spontaneity that should belong to his characters. Tolstoy ''makes them speak and move.'' Are they not therefore puppets? Notice what else Nabokov says Tolstoy does to a character:
''In the course of the novel, Tolstoy refers several times to Vronski's splendid regular teeth ... which make a smooth solid ivory front when he smiles; but before he disappears from the pages of the novel in part eight, his creator, punishing Vronski in his brilliant physique, inflicts upon him a marvelously described toothache.''
Could there be criticism given more from within? One quite forgets to ask for an explanation of how Vronski might enjoy his fictional freedom with no fear of doing anything that might incur the moral wrath of Tolstoy. His toothache is ''marvelously described.'' In effect, then, even if inflicted by Tolstoy, one feels it is the natural consequence of Vronski's character, built into the very cruelty of his brilliant mouth, the place where reality and literary art coincide. Nabokov says that to read a book properly, you eat it up. This is like what people mean when they say, to learn a foreign language, you sleep with a native speaker. The most precious understanding is acquired always from within.
Here is Nabokov again talking about Vronski as if he were a real person and yet a fictional hypothesis to be dealt with, even punished, by his creator: ''Vronski, a strikingly handsome but somewhat stockily built fellow, very intelligent but devoid of talent, socially charming but individually rather mediocre, reveals in his behavior toward Kitty a streak of bland insensitivity which may easily grade into callousness and even brutality later on.'' In the art of Tolstoy is the freedom of Vronski to be in the pain he deserves.
Inevitably, what Nabokov says of several Russian writers, can be made to apply to himself: ''Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth's exact whereabouts and essential properties. To Pushkin it was of marble under a noble sun; Dostoevski, a much inferior artist, saw it as a thing of blood and tears and hysterical and topical politics and sweat; and Chekhov kept a quizzical eye upon it, while seemingly engrossed in the hazy scenery all around. Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched, and found the place where the cross had once stood, or found - the image of his own self.''
The energy and wit of these images, the convergence of feeling and learning that makes them cogent, is the truth as rendered by Nabokov, and the image of himself. Here are some other examples:
''What do I mean by the ingredients of a dream? Let me make this quite clear. A dream is a show - a theatrical piece staged within the brain in a subdued light before a somewhat muddleheaded audience. The show is generally a very mediocre one, carelessly performed, with amateur actors and haphazard props and a wobbly backdrop.'' *
''Cases of flushing, blushing, reddening, crimsoning, coloring, etc. (and the opposite action of growing pale), are prodigiously frequent throughout this novel (''Anna Karenina'') and, generally, in the literature of the time. It might be speciously argued that in the nineteenth century people blushed and blanched more readily and more noticeably than today, mankind then being as it were younger; actually, Tolstoy is only following an old literary tradition of using the act of flushing, etc., as a kind of code or banner that informs or reminds the reader of this or that character's feelings.''
''I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers and I hate Tom-peeping over the fence of those lives - I hate the vulgarity of 'human interest,' I hate the rustle of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time -and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life; but this I must say. Dostoevski's gloating pity for people - pity for the humble and humiliated - this pity was purely emotional and his special lurid brand of the Christian faith by no means prevented him from leading a life extremely removed from his teachings. On the other hand, Leo Tolstoy like his representative Lyovin was organically unable to allow his conscience to strike a bargain with his animal nature - and he suffered cruelly whenever this animal nature temporarily triumphed over his better self.''
Nabokov argues for attention to mental or imaginative experience, created by individual artistic genius, in the concrete, technical minutiae of specific literary phenomena. He demonstrates the value and pleasure of this kind of attention, this kind of understanding. He will be celebrated for doing so, and yet people will continue to prefer hearing about real persons, and about the personal lives of artists; and ''human interest,'' a degrading passion, will prevail over the more desirable unreal-reality of art. To make these generalizations concrete, consider Nabokov's translation and analysis of Gogol:
'''A drowning man, it is said, will catch at the smallest chip of wood because at the moment he has not the presence of mind to reflect that hardly even a fly could hope to ride astride that chip, whereas he weighs almost a hundred and fifty pounds if not a good two hundred.'
''Who is that unfortunate bather, steadily and uncannily growing, adding weight, fattening himself on the marrow of a metaphor? We never shall know - but he almost managed to gain a footing.''
The chip of wood is art, the bather is Nabokov. In his hands the chip becomes a log, a raft, and he gains a footing, and he beckons us to come aboard. But the din of the ocean is the din of this real world. Still, we want to hear him and we might even come aboard. For in the fierce isolation of his genius - in his personal voice, his humor, his huge scholarly labors - he makes room for us.
"My life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!”
--from ANNA KARENINA
--from ANNA KARENINA
ris Murdoch, a prodigiously inventive and idiosyncratic British writer whose 26 novels offered lively plots, complex characters and intellectual speculation, died yesterday at a nursing home in Oxford, England. She was 79 and had Alzheimer's disease. Her struggle with Alzheimer's was documented recently in ''Elegy for Iris,'' a memoir by her husband, the critic and novelist John Bayley, who was at her bedside when she died. 
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