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