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The real Sutherland and VN
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Dear Charles and the List,
I've been enjoying re-reading some of Sutherland's literary essays and was additionally rewarded with an interesting reference to Nabokov.
Sutherland's essay on Anna Karenina, "What English novel is Anna reading," after quoting the passage in which Anna takes up the "English novel" while traveling back to Petersburg writes:
Vladimir Nabokov, when a lecturer at Cornell University, used to give a full lecture to his American undergraduates based on this passage. "Any ass can assimilate the main points of Tolstoy's attitude to adultery," Nabokov asserted, "but in order to enjoy Tolstoy's art the good reader must wish to visualize, for instance, the arrangement of a railway carriage on the Moscow-Petersburg train as it was a hundred years ago."*
It reminds me that too often readers of Nabokov are given to projecting onto VN our own prejudices instead of trying to accept that his own are not necessarily our own.
Carolyn
*Brian Boyd "... The American Years" p 175
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I've been enjoying re-reading some of Sutherland's literary essays and was additionally rewarded with an interesting reference to Nabokov.
Sutherland's essay on Anna Karenina, "What English novel is Anna reading," after quoting the passage in which Anna takes up the "English novel" while traveling back to Petersburg writes:
Vladimir Nabokov, when a lecturer at Cornell University, used to give a full lecture to his American undergraduates based on this passage. "Any ass can assimilate the main points of Tolstoy's attitude to adultery," Nabokov asserted, "but in order to enjoy Tolstoy's art the good reader must wish to visualize, for instance, the arrangement of a railway carriage on the Moscow-Petersburg train as it was a hundred years ago."*
It reminds me that too often readers of Nabokov are given to projecting onto VN our own prejudices instead of trying to accept that his own are not necessarily our own.
Carolyn
*Brian Boyd "... The American Years" p 175
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm