An A from
Nabokov
April 4, 2013Edward Jay Epstein.E-mail Print Share I wandered into Lit
311 at the beginning of my sophomore year at Cornell in September 1954.
It was
not that I had any interest in European literature, or any literature.
I was
just shopping for a class that met on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
mornings so
that I wouldn’t have any Saturday classes, and “literature” also filled
one of
the requirements for graduation. It was officially called “European
Literature
of the Nineteenth Century,” but unofficially called “Dirty Lit” by the
Cornell
Daily Sun, since it dealt with adultery in Anna Karenina and Madame
Bovary.
The
professor was Vladimir Nabokov, an émigré from tsarist Russia. About
six feet
tall and balding, he stood, with what I took to be an aristocratic
bearing, on
the stage of the two-hundred-fifty-seat lecture hall in Goldwin Smith.
Facing
him on the stage was his white-haired wife Vera, whom he identified
only as “my
course assistant.” He made it clear from the first lecture that he had
little
interest in fraternizing with students, who would be known not by their
name
but by their seat number. Mine was 121. He said his only rule was that
we could
not leave his lecture, even to use the bathroom, without a doctor’s
note.
He then
described his requisites for reading the assigned books. He said we did
not
need to know anything about their historical context, and that we
should under
no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them, since
novels are
works of pure invention. The authors, he continued, had one and only
one
purpose: to enchant the reader. So all we needed to appreciate them,
aside from
a pocket dictionary and a good memory, was our own spines. He assured
us that
the authors he had selected—Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Marcel Proust,
James
Joyce, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Robert Louis
Stevenson—would produce tingling we could detect in our spines.
So began the
course. Unfortunately, distracted by the gorges, lakes, movie houses,
corridor
dates, and other more local enchantments of Ithaca, I did not get
around to
reading any of Anna Karenina before Nabokov sprang a pop quiz. It
consisted of
an essay question: “Describe the train station in which Anna first met
Vronsky.”
Initially, I
was stymied by this question because, having not yet read the book, I
did not
know how Tolstoy had portrayed the station. But I did recall the
station shown
in the 1948 movie starring Vivien Leigh. Having something of an eidetic
memory,
I was able to visualize a vulnerable-looking Leigh in her black dress
wandering
through the station, and, to fill the exam book, I described in great
detail everything
shown in the movie, from a bearded vendor hawking tea in a potbellied
copper
samovar to two white doves practically nesting overhead. Only after the
exam
did I learn that many of the details I described from the movie were
not in the
book. Evidently, the director Julien Duvivier had had ideas of his own.
Consequently, when Nabokov asked “seat 121” to report to his office
after
class, I fully expected to be failed, or even thrown out of Dirty Lit.
What I had
not taken into account was Nabokov’s theory that great novelists create
pictures in the minds of their readers that go far beyond what they
describe in
the words in their books. In any case, since I was presumably the only
one
taking the exam to confirm his theory by describing what was not in the
book,
and since he apparently had no idea of Duvivier’s film, he not only
gave me the
numerical equivalent of an A, but offered me a one-day-a-week job as an
“auxiliary course assistant.” I was to be paid $10 a week. Oddly
enough, it
also involved movies. Every Wednesday, the movies changed at the four
theaters
in downtown Ithaca, called by Nabokov “the near near,” “the near far,”
“the far
near,” and “the far far.” My task, which used up most of my weekly
payment, was
to see all four new movies on Wednesday and Thursday, and then brief
him on
them on Friday morning. He said that since he had time to see only one
movie,
this briefing would help him decide which one of them, if any, to see.
It was a
perfect job for me: I got paid for seeing movies.
All went
well for the next couple of months. I had caught up with the reading,
and
greatly enjoyed my Friday morning chats with Nabokov in his office on
the
second floor of Goldwin Smith. Even though they rarely lasted more than
five
minutes, it made me the envy of other students in Dirty Lit. Vera was
usually
sitting across the desk from him, making me feel as though I had
interrupted
their extended study date. My undoing came just after he had lectured
on
Gogol’s Dead Souls.
The day
before I had seen The Queen of Spades, a 1949 British film based on
Alexander
Pushkin’s 1833 short story. It concerned a Russian officer who, in his
desperation to win at cards, murdered an elderly Russian countess while
trying
to learn her secret method of picking cards in the game of faro. He
seemed
uninterested in having me recount the plot, which he must have known
well, but
his head shot up when I said in conclusion that it reminded me of Dead
Souls.
Vera also turned around and stared directly at me. Peering intently at
me, he
asked, “Why do you think that?”
I instantly
realized I had made a remark that apparently connected with a view he
had, or
was developing, concerning these two Russian writers. At that point, I
should
have left the office, making some excuse about needing to give the
question
more thought. Instead, I said pathetically, “They are both Russian.”
His face
dropped, and Vera turned back to face him. While my gig continued for
several
more weeks, it was never the same.