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Pages of VN lecture still AWOL?
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Does anyone happen to know if the two pages missing from Nabokov's amazing
"The Art of Literature and Commonsense" have been found since *Lectures on
Literature *was published in 1980? Or how likely they are to have turned up
in the past 30 years?
The tantalizing lacuna: "...That human life is but a first installment of
the serial soul and that one’s individual secret is not lost in the process
of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic
conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we
remember that only commonsense rules immortality out. A creative writer,
creative in the particular sense I am attempting to convey, cannot help
feeling that in his rejecting the world of the matter-of-fact, in his
taking sides with the irrational, the illogical, the inexplicable, and the
fundamentally good, he is performing something similar in a rudimentary way
to what* [two pages missing]* under the cloudy skies of gray Venus."
I also wonder if Nabokov's lecture notes still exist, for books other than
the ones published in *Lectures on Literature, Lectures on Russian
Literature, *and *Lectures on Don Quixote*? Together those three books
contain about 15 lectures, but in one interview (reprinted in *Strong
Opinions*) he said he wrote 200 lectures:
"In 1940, before launching on my academic career in America, I fortunately
took the trouble of writing one hundred lectures--about 2,000 pages--on
Russian literature, and later another hundred lectures on great novelists
from Jane Austen to James Joyce. This kept me happy at Wellesley and
Cornell for twenty academic years."
I'd love to read the remaining 185 or so lectures he wrote, or at least to
know what the books were, since he seems to have lectured only on what he
considered masterpieces.
Many thanks for any help,
Brian Tomba
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Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
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"The Art of Literature and Commonsense" have been found since *Lectures on
Literature *was published in 1980? Or how likely they are to have turned up
in the past 30 years?
The tantalizing lacuna: "...That human life is but a first installment of
the serial soul and that one’s individual secret is not lost in the process
of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic
conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we
remember that only commonsense rules immortality out. A creative writer,
creative in the particular sense I am attempting to convey, cannot help
feeling that in his rejecting the world of the matter-of-fact, in his
taking sides with the irrational, the illogical, the inexplicable, and the
fundamentally good, he is performing something similar in a rudimentary way
to what* [two pages missing]* under the cloudy skies of gray Venus."
I also wonder if Nabokov's lecture notes still exist, for books other than
the ones published in *Lectures on Literature, Lectures on Russian
Literature, *and *Lectures on Don Quixote*? Together those three books
contain about 15 lectures, but in one interview (reprinted in *Strong
Opinions*) he said he wrote 200 lectures:
"In 1940, before launching on my academic career in America, I fortunately
took the trouble of writing one hundred lectures--about 2,000 pages--on
Russian literature, and later another hundred lectures on great novelists
from Jane Austen to James Joyce. This kept me happy at Wellesley and
Cornell for twenty academic years."
I'd love to read the remaining 185 or so lectures he wrote, or at least to
know what the books were, since he seems to have lectured only on what he
considered masterpieces.
Many thanks for any help,
Brian Tomba
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/