 | | NYPL, Berg Collection |  Among Nabokov's 1950s lecture notes for Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is this diagram of the "ladies' part" of a "very primitive" sleeping car, in which Anna would have ridden. |
As political tensions mounted in Europe, Vladimir Nabokov secured his May 1940 exit from Paris with the promise of a summer stint teaching creative writing--primarily drama--and Russian literature that summer at Stanford University, in California. After supporting himself and his family for nearly two decades tutoring in language and literature, and failing to find a more stable teaching post in England, it was less than he had hoped for. But he was optimistic: by the time of his arrival in the United States he had prepared more than 100 lectures in anticipation of a steady income to be derived from university teaching.Following the summer in Palo Alto, California, he spent an enjoyable and productive year at Wellesley College, in Massachusetts, as a writer-in-residence, a post that allowed him a good deal of free time to pursue his own literary ideas as well as lepidopterological work. He began making frequent trips into Cambridge, to Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. At the end of the 1941-2 academic year, he moved his family to Cambridge and became a research fellow at Harvard, earning a modest salary. Forced to supplement this income with occasional satellite lectures, he wrote to Edmund Wilson in frustration: "Funny--to know Russian better than any living person--in America at least--and more English than any Russian in America--and to experience such difficulty in getting a university job. I am getting rather jittery about next year." From his native tongue: lectures on Russian literature  | |
| Nabokov's European Fiction Class | | | According to his biographer Brian Boyd, the course at Cornell in which Nabokov lectured on a small selection of "supreme masterpieces"--Literature 311{A150}312: Masters of European Fiction--was the most popular academic offering on campus, "eclipsed in student number only by Pete Seeger's folk-song class."
But Nabokov was driven to distraction by the infelicities and inaccuracies that plagued many of the standard translations, which he was forced to assign to his students at Cornell. For example, at the first Madame Bovary lecture, he would take charge: "So before placing in your innocent hands this book, let me give you a list of the worst mistranslations to be corrected in the first 60 or so pages ..." | | |
Wellesley College continued to provide increasingly welcome teaching opportunities, though his post was not made permanent. In 1943, Nabokov offered a non-credit course in elementary Russian at Wellesley, and the following year became a lecturer in Russian. The translations he had prepared for his Stanford and Wellesley classes soon grew into publication projects. He adapted lectures on Gogol's "The Overcoat" and Dead Souls into a study published by New Directions in 1944; the Lermontov, Tyutchev and Pushkin translations comprised Three Russian Poets, published soon after. The translation of Pushkin into English would become an active lifelong goal for Nabokov. By the fall of 1946, he was able to add to his agenda a course in Russian literature in translation, and had two years of experience with those lectures before Cornell University wooed him away with promises of a more substantial post, as head of the Russian department--a department that failed to materialize during the decade he spent at the university. Nabokov made his home in Ithaca, New York, from the fall of 1948 through January 1959, with an occasional hiatus. His first courses were surveys of Russian literature, in the original and in translation, including works by Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina, "the supreme masterpiece of nineteenth-century literature," and "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"), Nikolay Gogol (Dead Souls and "The Overcoat") and sometimes Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (Fathers and Sons). In 1949 he began an Aleksandr Pushkin seminar, which required a good deal of his own translations of Eugene Onegin. In his adopted language: lectures on literature
In 1950 Nabokov gave his first lecture for Literature 311-312, Masters of European Fiction, a course that would grow from a modest enrollment of several dozen students in its first year to become the second most popular course at the university in his final term. He delivered his last lecture in Ithaca on January 19, 1959.  | | NYPL, Berg Collection | | In his copy of Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," Nabokov retranslated virtually the entire work interlinearly; on this page, he has depicted the beetle into which Gregor Samsa metamorphoses. |
Stories of Nabokov's presence on campus and his lecture style have grown beyond local legend. Cornell alumni recall Nabokov's wife, Véra, as a near appendage to the professor--she passed out papers, wrote notes on the "gray board," graded papers, held his office hours and, in extreme circumstances, delivered his lectures, which she read carefully from his prepared manuscripts. Fredson Bowers, the editor of the published Lectures on Literature and Lectures on Russian Literature, observes that Véra, having performed those functions, likely made routine editorial decisions in preparing several of Nabokov's typescript versions for publication after her husband's death.Nabokov was a favorite teacher of many who attended Cornell, and his lectures were often overflowing with students. Although his demeanor was often gruff, he was not a hard grader. When he returned tests, he was taken with reading out the grades of those who received a 90 or above and would ask them to come to the front of the class. About tests he once stated: "I shall give you tests, because study without monitoring is like writing on water." Nabokov taught the same authors and books for nearly a decade, almost without exception: Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Charles Dickens (Bleak House), Jane Austen (Mansfield Park), James Joyce (Ulysses), Franz Kafka ("The Metamorphosis"), Robert Louis Stevenson ("The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde") and Marcel Proust (Swann's Way). Bowers notes that "Nabokov was prohibited from teaching American works at Cornell because he was not a member of the English Department." 
NYPL, Berg Collection | In 1969, Nabokov told an interviewer, "Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom's and Stephen's intertwining itineraries clearly traced." Nabokov drew just such a map as part of his lecture notes for Ulysses. |
Embedded in the text of the published lectures themselves is Nabokov's philosophy that one must teach books, not ideas. Two of the best-known examples of this philosophy in action are his diagram of the paths of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through the streets of Dublin for Joyce's Ulysses, and the anatomy of the Gregor Samsa domed beetle for Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." Nabokov had planned to include many academic anecdotes in the final installment of his memoir, the unrealized Speak On, Memory; among the notes that survive are his instructions to students to separate from their comrades during exams, to write in ink and not to plan to use the bathroom if they haven't brought a doctor's note. Nabokov offered a volume of his lectures to Viking Press in the course of negotiations in 1951 for other works, negotiations that ultimately came to nothing. In 1954, he began actively revising some of the lectures with an eye to their publication, but a decade passed before he offered them to Putnam's. Finally, in 1972, they were included as part of his second McGraw-Hill contract--though he had recently added a note to his archive that read, "My university lectures (Tolstoy, Kafka, Flaubert, Cervantes, etc. etc.) are chaotic and sloppy and must never be published. None of them!" That contract was nullified by his death, in 1977; Véra and Dmitri took on the task of assembling the lectures from notes, manuscripts and typescripts, and they were eventually published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1980 and 1981. Despite the rewards of teaching, Nabokov repeatedly lamented its necessity. In 1951, Véra wrote to New Yorker fiction editor Katharine White that her husband was having "probably the worst year of his life and though he derives much pleasure from his big course and from the students' reaction, the necessity to neglect his writing often makes him feel miserable." He himself wrote to Edmund Wilson, "I am sick of teaching, I am sick of teaching, I am sick of teaching." But he did not immediately resign his Cornell post in the wake of Lolita's American success in 1959. He requested a semester's leave and, fully expecting to return in the fall, stored many possessions locally before sailing for a European sojourn. But the demands of his newfound international fame, coupled with his own ambitious projects, proved too much. After almost a year in Los Angeles working on the Lolita screenplay (of which Stanley Kubrick used only a small portion in his film), Nabokov, who had given his last university lecture at Cornell, and his wife would live out their remaining years abroad, settling into the Montreux Palace Hotel in the fall of 1961. |
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