"But on the page, Nabokov - who interrupts an observation that Mansfield Park is set at the time of Thomas Jefferson's Embargo Act to point out that "If you read embargo backwards, you get 'O grab me'" - still speaks with droll authority about his canon of European fiction. Disdainful of mining literature for political, sociological, or biographical information and wary of what passes for "great ideas," he fondles details, reveling in long passages from his chosen texts. Nabokov is an attentive guide to how these books are constructed, sentence by sentence. It is impossible not to come away from his lectures with a quickened sense of what makes Dickens tick and Flaubert glimmer. But, in their strong opinions (Nabokov dismisses Rilke and Mann as "dwarfs or plaster saints" and claims that music is more primitive than literature or painting) and preoccupations (a skilled lepidopterist, he offers a meticulous analysis of precisely what species of insect Kafka's Gregor Samsa metamorphoses into), these lectures allow the reader acquaintance with the artist who created Lolita and Pale Fire."
National Book Critics Circle: Steven G. Kellman on Nabokov's... 20 Dec 2007 ... "But, in their strong opinions (Nabokov dismisses Rilke and Mann as "dwarfs or plaster saints" and claims that music is more primitive than ..." bookcritics.org/.../Steven_G._Kellman_on_Nabokovs_Lectures_on_Literature/ -
 
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years - Brian Boyd - 1993 - Biography & Autobiography -
Beside Kafka, the greatest German writer of our time, Nabokov proclaimed, Rilke or Mann were dwarfs or plaster saints, and one student who took Nabokov's ...
 books.google.com.br/books?isbn=0691024715...

.......................................

. . feast on ancient books to the lazy enchanting lap of wavelets in the Floating Library, in memoriam of Dr. Sineokov, who had drowned at just that spot in the city river. The grinding of chains, the little gallery with its orange-colored lamp shades, the plash, the water's smooth surface oiled by the moon, and, in the distance, lights flickering past in the black web of a lofty bridge . . .
- Vladimir Nabokov (Invitation to a beheading)