Two or three typos marred my copy from VN's Russian lectures and I wouldn't
have needed to copy them down, had I first checked
them with what is offered online. [ concerning the message "A few postings ago there was an exchange
between Frances Assa and me in connection to "Nabokov's truth"]
Nablers will find a more reliable quote and
illuminating comments here:
excerpts from NABOKOV'S RUSSIANS, by Leonard
Michaels -.Published: October 25, 1981 .
"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. [ ]. 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 Vladimir Nabokov.
His voice summons us to a belief in high art [ ]... 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.''
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.[ ]