In the forties, Nabokov taught a Cornell course on Western Literature. His lecture notes were published in book form posthumously and, though they're sometimes rough, they do offer a precipitous, detailed, loving take on great writers and great books -- books, incidentally, now on the public domain and easily available on-line. (And also available via the fellows at Amazon.Com.)Here they are, along with a site for each writer. They are presented here for whoever is reading or re-reading these masterpieces -- or is interested in doing so.
the literature
the lectures
mansfield park
"Mansfield Park is a fairy tale, but then all novels are, in a sense, fairy tales. At first sight Jane Austen's manner and matter may seem to be old fashioned, stilted, unreal. But this is a delusion to which the bad reader succumbs. The good reader is aware that the quest for real life, real people, and so forth is a meaningless process when speaking of books. In a book, the reality of a person, or object, or a circumstance depends exclusively on the world of that particular book."
Oxford University Press Edition ($4.76) | Everyman's Library Hardcover Edition ($14.00)
bleak house
"All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week. But I think Dickens will prove stronger."
Wordsworth Classics Edition ($3.95) | Everyman's Library Hardcover Edition ($16.95)
madame bovary
"We now start to enjoy another masterpiece, yet another fairy tale. Of all the fairy tales in this series, Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary is the most romantic. Stylistically it is prose doing what poetry is supposed to do."A child to whom you read a story may ask you, is the story true? And if not, the child demands a true one. Let us not persevere in this juvenile attitude towards the books we read. Of course, if somebody tells you that Mr. Smith has seen a blue saucer with a green operator whiz by, you do ask, is it true? because in one way or another the fact of its being true would affect your whole life, would be of infinite practical consequence to you. But do not ask whether a poem or a novel is true. Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no practical value whatsoever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a professor of literature. The girl Emma Bovary never existed: the book Madame Bovary shall exist forever and ever. A book lives longer than a girl."
Dover Thrift Edition ($1.60) | Everyman's Library Hardcover Edition ($11.90)
the strange case of dr. jekyll & mr. hyde
"And now comes my main injunction. Please completely forget, disremember, obliterate, unlearn, consign to oblivion any notion you may have had that Jekyll and Hyde is some kind of a mystery story, a detective story, or movie. It is of course quite true that Stevenson's short novel, written in 1885, is one of the ancestors of the modern mystery story. But today's mystery story is the very negation of style, being, at the best, conventional literature. Frankly, I am not one of those collge professors who coyly boasts of enjoying detective stories -- they are too badly written for my taste and bore me to death. Whereas Stevenson's story -- God bless his pure soul -- lame as a detective story. Neither is it a parable nor an allegory, for it would be tasteless as either. It has, however, its own special enchantment if we regard it as phenomenom of style. It is not only a good 'bogey story,' as Stevenson exclaimed when awakening from a dream in which he had visualized it much in the same way I suppose as magic cerebration had granted Coleridge the vision of the most famous of unfinished poems. It is also, and more importantly, 'a fable that lies nearer to poetry than to ordinary prose fiction' and therefore belongs to the same order of art as, for instance, Madame Bovary or Dead Souls."
Dover Thrift Edition ($0.80) | Everyman's Library Hardcover Edition ($10.50)
swann's way
"Proust began the work in the autumn of 1906 in Paris and completed the first draft in 1912. The whole is a treasure hunt where the treasure is time and the hiding place the past: this is the inner meaning of the tile In Search of Lost Time. The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb and tide of memory, waves of emotions such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria -- this is the material of the enormous and yet singularly light and translucid work."
Vintage International Edition ($9.60) | Modern Library Hardcover Edition ($15.37)
the metamorphosis
"We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern correponds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss. Beauty plus pity---that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual. If Kafka's The Metamorphosis strikes anyone as something more than an entomological fantasy, then I congratulate him on having joined the ranks of good and great readers."
Dover Thrift Edition ($1.20) | Everyman's Library Hardcover Edition ($14.00)
ulysses
"Ulysses is a fat book of more than two hundred sixty thousand words; it is a rich book with a vocabulary of about thirty thousand words. The Dublin setting is built partly on data supplied by an exile's memory, but mainly on data from Thom's Dublin Directory, whither professors of literature, before discussing Ulysses, secretly wing their way in order to astound their students with the knowledge Joyce himself stored up with the aid of that very directory. He also used, throughout the book, a copy of the Dublin newspaper the Evening Telegraph of Thursday, 16 June 1904, price one halfpenny, which among other things featured that day the Ascot Gold Cup race (with Throwaway, an outsider, winning), an appalling American disaster (the excursion steamer General Slocum on fire), and a motorcar race for the Gordon Bennett Cup in Homburg, Germany."
Vintage Books Edition ($13.60) | Modern Library Hardcover Edition ($15.37)