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Vladimir Nabokov criticism

April 30, 2015 by Roy Johnson

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Vladimir Nabokov criticism is a bibliography of critical comment on Nabokov and his works, with details of each publication and a brief description of its contents. The details include active web links to Amazon where you can buy the books, often in a variety of formats – new, used, and as Kindle eBooks. The listings are arranged in alphabetical order of author.

The list includes new books and older publications which may now be considered rare. It also includes print-on-demand or Kindle versions of older texts which are much cheaper than the original. Others (including some new books) are often sold off at rock bottom prices. Whilst compiling these listings I bought a copy of Jayne Grayson’s Vladimir Nabokov – Illustrated life for one pound.

Nabokov’s Otherworld – Vladimir E. Alexadrov, Princeton University Press, 2014. This book shows that behind his ironic manipulation of narrative and his puzzle-like treatment of detail there lies an aesthetic rooted in his intuition of a transcendent realm and in his consequent redefinition of ‘nature’ and ‘artifice’ as synonyms.

The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov – Vladimir E. Alexandrov, 2014. Reprint of a 1995 collection of articles and critical essays on Nabokov’s work, plus background reading to his life and suggestions for further reading.

Nabokov’s Dark Cinema – Alfred Appel, Oxford University Press, 1975.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Brian Boyd, Princeton University Press, 2001. This is the first volume of the definitive biography.

Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years – Brian Boyd, Princeton University Press, 1993. This is the second volume of the definitive biography.

Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery – Brian Boyd, Princeton University Press, 2001. Boyd argues that the book has two narrators, Shade and Charles Kinbote, but reveals that Kinbote had some strange and highly surprising help in writing his sections. In light of this interpretation, Pale Fire now looks distinctly less postmodern – and more interesting than ever.

Stalking Nabokov – Brian Boyd, Columbia University Press, 2013. This collection features essays incorporating material gleaned from Nabokov’s archive as well as new discoveries and formulations.

Nabokov’s ADA: The Place of Consciousness – Brian Boyd, Cybereditions Corporation, 2002. Provides not only the best commentary on Ada, but also a brilliant overview of Nabokov’s metaphysics, and has now been updated with a new preface, four additional chapters and two comprehensive new indexes.

Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita (Readers’ Guides to Essential Criticism) – Christine Clegg, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Examines the critical history of Lolita through a broad range of interpretations.

Nabokov’s Early Fiction : Patterns of Self and Other – Julian Connolly, Cambridge University Press, 1992. This book traces the evolution of Vladimir Nabokov’s prose fiction from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s. It focuses on a crucial subject: the relationship between self and other in its various forms (including character to character, character to author, author to reader).

Nabokov and his Fiction: New Perspectives – Julian W. Connolly, Cambridge University Press, 1999. This volume brings together the work of eleven of the world’s foremost Nabokov scholars, offering perspectives on the writer and his fiction. Their essays cover a broad range of topics and approaches, from close readings of major texts, including Speak, Memory and Pale Fire, to penetrating discussions of the significant relationship between Nabokov’s personal beliefs and experiences and his art.

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Julian W. Connolly (ed), Cambridge University Press, 2005. Topics receiving fresh coverage include Nabokov’s narrative strategies, the evolution of his world-view, and his relationship to the literary and cultural currents of his day. The volume also contains valuable supplementary material such as a chronology of the writer’s life and a guide to further critical reading.

Vladimir Nabokov (Writers & Their Work) – Neil Cornwell, Northcote House Publishers, 2008. A study that examines five of Nabokov’s major novels, plus his short stories and critical writings, situating his work against the ever-expanding mass of Nabokov scholarship.

Nabokov’s Eros and the Poetics of Desire – Maurice Couturier, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. A study which argues that Nabokov presented a whole spectrum of sexual behaviours ranging from standard to perverse, either sterile like bestiality, sexual lethargy or sadism, or poetically creative, like homosexuality, nympholeptcy and incest.

Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov – Leyland De la Durantaye, Cornell University Press, 2010. A study focusing on Lolita but also addressing other major works (especially Speak, Memory and Pale Fire), asking whether the work of this writer whom many find cruel contains a moral message and, if so, why that message is so artfully concealed.

Nabokov His Life in Art a Critical Narrative – Andrew Field, Little, Brown & Co, 1967. A combination of biography and exploration of other works by one of the first serious Nabokov scholars – though they later fell into disagreement.

V. N.: Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov – Andrew Field, TBS The Book Service, 1987. Andrew Field was one of the first major critics and biographers of Nabokov, although they later disagreed about his work and its interpretation.

Vladimir Nabokov: Bergsonian and Russian Formalist Influences in His Novels – Michael Glynn, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. This study seeks to counter the critical orthodoxy that conceives of Vladimir Nabokov as a Symbolist writer concerned with a transcendent reality.

Vladimir Nabokov an illustrated life – Jane Grayson, New York: Overlook, 2004. Short biography and introduction to his work, charmingly illustrated with period photos and sketches.

Freud and Nabokov – Geoffrey Green, University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius – Kurt Johnson, McGraw-Hill, 2002. This book, which is part biography, explores the worldwide crisis in biodiversity and the place of butterflies in Nabokov’s fiction.

Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play – Thomas Karshan, Oxford University Press, 2011. This study traces the idea of art as play back to German aesthetics, and shows how Nabokov’s aesthetic outlook was formed by various Russian émigré writers who espoused those aesthetics. It then follows Nabokov’s exploration of play as subject and style through his whole oeuvre.

Reading Vladimir Nabokov: ‘Lolita’ – John Lennard, Humanities ebooks, 2012. Provides convenient overviews of Nabokov’s life and of the novel (including both Kubrick’s and Lyne’s film-adaptations), before considering Lolita as pornography, as lepidoptery, as film noir, and as parody.

Keys to the “Gift”: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel – Yuri Leving, Academic Studies Press, 2011. A new systematization of the main available data on Nabokov’s most complex Russian novel. From notes in Nabokov’s private correspondence to scholarly articles accumulated during the seventy years since the novel’s first appearance in print, this work draws from a broad spectrum of existing material in a succinct and coherent way, as well as providing innovative analyses.

Shades of Laura: Vladimir Nabokov’s Last Novel, the Original of Laura – Yuri Leving, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. A collection of essays which investigate the event of publication and reconstitute the book’s critical reception, reproducing a selection of some of the most salient reviews.

Speak, Nabokov – Michael Maar, Verso, 2010. Using the themes that run through Nabokov’s fiction to illuminate the life that produced them, Maar constructs a compelling psychological and philosophical portrait.

Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice – Paul D. Morris, University of Toronto Press, 2011. Offers a comprehensive reading of Nabokov’s Russian and English poetry, until now a neglected facet of his oeuvre. The study re-evaluates Nabokov s poetry and demonstrates that poetry was in fact central to his identity as an author and was the source of his distinctive authorial lyric voice.

Vladimir Nabokov – Norman Page, London: Routledge, 2013. The Critical Heritage is a collection of reviews and essays that trace the history and development of Nabokov’s critical reputation.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook – Ellen Pifer, Oxford University Press, 2002. This casebook gathers together an interview with Nabokov as well as nine critical essays. The essays follow a progression focusing first on textual and thematic features and then proceeding to broader issues and cultural implications, including the novel’s relations to other works of literature and art and the movies adapted from it.

The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov – Andrea Pitzer, Pegasus: Reprint edition, 2014. This book manages to be a number of things all at once – a biography, a primer on revolutionary Russian history, a critical survey of Nabokov’s novels, an act of literary detective work, and a cliffhanger narrative concerning a fateful dinner appointment between literary legends.

Vladimir Nabokov: A Pictorial Biography – Ellendea Proffer (ed), Ardis, 1991.

Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute – Peter Quennell, Littlehampton Book Services, 1979.

Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels – David Rampton, Cambridge University Press, 1984. This study assembles evidence from Nabokov’s own critical writings to show that the relationship of art to human life is central to Nabokov’s work. It pursues this argument through a close reading of novels from different stages of Nabokov’s career.

Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita – Robert Roper, Bloomsbury USA, 2015. Roper mined fresh sources to bring detail to Nabokov’s American journeys, and he traces their significant influence on his work – on two-lane highways and in late-’40s motels and cafés – to understand Nabokov’s seductive familiarity with the American mundane.

Nabokov at Cornell – Gavriel Shapiro, Cornell University Press, 2001. Contains twenty-five chapters by leading experts on Nabokov, ranging widely from Nabokov’s poetry to his prose, from his original fiction to translation and literary scholarship, from literature to visual art and from the humanities to natural science. The book concludes with a reminiscence of the family’s life in Ithaca by Nabokov’s son, Dmitri.

Nabokov’s Shakespeare – Samuel Shuman, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Explores the many and deep ways in which the works of Shakespeare penetrate the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, one of the finest English prose stylists of the twentieth century.

Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over Again – Graham Vickers, Chicago Review Press, 2008. This study establishes who Lolita really was back in 1958, explores her predecessors of all stripes, and examines the multitude of movies, theatrical shows, literary spin-offs, artifacts, fashion, art, photography, and tabloid excesses that have distorted her identity and stolen her name.

Nabokov and the Art of Painting – Gerard de Vries and Donald Barton Johnson, Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Nabokov’s novels refer to over a hundred paintings, and show a brilliance of colours and light and dark are in a permanent dialogue with each other. Following the introduction describing the many associations Nabokov made between the literary and visual arts, several of his novels are discussed in detail.

Vladimir Nabokov (Critical Lives) – Barbara Wyllie, Reaktion Books, 2010. This book investigates the author’s poetry and prose in both Russian and English, and examines the relationship between Nabokov’s extraordinary erudition and the themes that recur across the span of his works

More on Vladimir Nabokov
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Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

Vladimir Nabokov greatest works

September 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Vladimir Nabokov is one of the great twentieth-century writers. He wrote of himself: “I was born in Russia and went to university in England, then lived in Germany for twenty years before emigrating to the United States.” The first half of his oeuvre was written in Russian; then he switched briefly to French, and then permanently to English. He also spent a third period of exile living in Geneva, and translating his earlier works from Russian into English.

Nabokov loves word-play, stories that pose riddles, and games which keep readers guessing. Above all, he loves jokes. He produces witty and intellectual writing – and yet persistently draws our attention to moments of tenderness and neglected sadness in life. It is lyric, poetic writing, in the best sense of these terms.

Beginners should start with some of the short stories or the early novels, before tackling the challenges of his later work. Be prepared for black humour and unashamed tenderness – often on the same page. And be sure to keep a dictionary on hand.

Lolita (1955) is without doubt Nabokov’s masterpiece – a tour de force of fun and games in both character, plot, and linguistic artistry. And yet its overt subject is something now considered quite dangerous – paedophilia. A sophisticated European college professor goes on a sexual joy ride around the USA with his teenage step-daughter. He evades the law, but drives deeper and deeper into a moral Sargasso, and the end is a tragedy for all concerned. There are wonderful evocations of middle America, terrific sub-plots, and language games with deeply embedded clues on every page. You will probably need to read it more than once to work out what is going on, and each reading will reveal further depths.

Lolita – a tutorial and study guide
Lolita – buy the book at Amazon UK
Lolita – buy the book at Amazon US

Pale Fire is a very clever artistic joke. It’s a book in two parts – the first a long poem (quite readable) written by an American poet who we are encouraged to think of as someone like Robert Frost. The second half is a series of footnoted commentaries on the text written by his neighbour, friend, and editor. But as we read on the explanation begins to take over the poem itself, we begin to doubt the reliability – and ultimately the sanity – of the editor, and we end up suspended in a nether-world, half way between life and illusion. It’s a brilliantly funny parody of the scholarly ‘method’ – written around the same time that Nabokov was himself writing an extensive commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

Pale Fire – a tutorial and study guide
Pale Fire – buy the book at Amazon UK
Pale Fire – buy the book at Amazon US

Pnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.

Pnin – a tutorial and study guide
Pnin – buy the book at Amazon UK
Pnin – buy the book at Amazon US

Collected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Speak Memory is supposed to be an autobiography, but if you are looking for frank confessions and concrete details, you will be disappointed. Nabokov was almost pathologically private, and he argued consistently that readers should not look into writer’s private lives. This ‘memoir’ covers Nabokov’s first forty years, up to his departure from Europe for America at the outset of World War II. The ostensible subject-matter is his emergence as a writer, his early loves and his marriage, his passion for butterflies and his lost homeland. But what he really offers is a series of meditations on human experience, the passage of time, and how the magic of art is able to transcend and encapsulate both.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Despair – is an early ‘Berlin’ novel which deals with the literary figure of ‘the double’. Chocolate manufacturer Herman Herman (see the point?) is being cuckolded by his vulgar brother-in-law and his sluttish wife. He meets a man who he believes to be his exact double, and plans a fake suicide to escape his torments. Everything goes horribly wrong, in a way which is simultaneously grotesque, amusing, and rather sad. All of this is typical of the way in which Nabokov manages to blend black humour with a lyrical prose style.

Despair – a tutorial and study guide
Despair – buy the book at Amazon UK
Despair – buy the book at Amazon US

Mary (1923) is his first novel, in which he evokes the raptures of youthful pleasures, and the discovery of passion and loss. His lyrical prose records a young Russian exile’s recollections of his first love affair. But the woman in question clearly symbolises his relationship with Russia. Nabokov is also good at a creating a marvellous sense of awe in contemplating the quiet aesthetic pleasures in everyday events and special moments of being.

Mary – a tutorial and study guide
Mary – buy the book at Amazon UK
Mary – buy the book at Amazon US

Laughter in the Dark and King, Queen, Knave show a much darker side to his nature, with its focus on adultery and deception. These traits are taken to an uncomfortable extreme in Laughter in the Dark (1932) which plots the downfall of a man who runs off with a young girl who, when he is rendered blind in a car accident, secretly moves her lover in to live under the same roof. The pair of them torment the protagonist in a particularly gruesome fashion – a theme Nabokov was to explore twenty years later in Lolita.

Laughter in the Dark – a tutorial and study guide
Laughter in the Dark – buy the book at Amazon UK
Laughter in the Dark – buy the book at Amazon US

The Gift (1936) is generally held to be the greatest of his Russian novels. It deals with the ironies and agonies of exile. It is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It’s also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write – a book very much like The Gift itself. The novel also includes a deeply felt fictionalisation of the murder of Nabokov’s own father in 1922 whilst he was attempting to stop a political assassination.

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More on Vladimir Nabokov
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Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

Vladimir Nabokov life and works

September 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

1899. Vladimir Nabokov was born in St Petersburg on April 23 [the same birthday as Shakespeare]. His father was a prominent jurist, liberal politician, and a member of the Duma (Russia’s first parliament). His mother was the daughter of a wealthy aristocratic family.

1900. Nabokov learned English and then French from various governesses. The Nabokov family spoke a mixture of French, English, and Russian in their household.

1904. The first national congress (zemstvo) was held in St Petersburg in November. Its final session took place in the Nabokov home.

1905. ‘Bloody Sunday’ in January when Tsar’s troops fired at demonstration of workers converging on the Winter Palace. There was a general strike throughout Russia in October.

1906. Nabokov’s father was elected to the first state Duma – then banned from politics for signing a manifesto opposing conscription and taxes.

1908. Nabokov’s father served three month sentence in Kresty Prison.

1911. Nabokov began attending the highly regarded Tenishev School – a noted liberal academy. He was driven to school each day in the family Rolls Royce.

1914. Nabokov writes his first poems. First World War begins.

1915. The start of his first love affair, with Valentina Shulgina.

1916. Nabokov privately publishes a collection of poems Stikhi in Petrograd. His uncle dies, leaving him a country house and estate, plus a substantial fortune.

1917. February revolution in Russia. Nabokov’s father was a member of the provisional government. Following the October revolution, the aristocratic Nabokov home comes under attack. The family moves to Crimea in the south.

1919. The family flees into exile from the Crimea on an old Greek ship carrying dried fruit. The family settles provisionally in London.

1919. His father moves the family to Berlin – the first centre of Russian emigration. Nabokov stays behind in England, studying French and Russian literature at Trinity College Cambridge. Some of these experiences appear in his first English-language novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

1922. His father is murdered while attempting to stop an assassination attempt on the politician Pavel Miliukov. This episode later appears in The Gift. Nabokov translates Alice in Wonderland into Russian. He becomes engaged to Svetlana Siewert in Berlin.

1923. Nabokov moves to Berlin, where he earns a living giving English and tennis lessons, and working as a walk-on extra in films. His engagement is broken off. He publishes poems, reviews, chess problems, and short stories in ‘Rul (The Rudder), a liberal newspaper founded by his father.

1925. Nabokov marries Vera Evseena Slonim.

1926. Publishes Mary, his first novel. It goes unnoticed.

1928. His second novel, King, Queen, Knave appears, and causes the first stirrings of interest and controversy in Russian emigré literary circles.

1929. His third novel, The Luzhin Defense is published serially. He develops a readership in Berlin and Paris – the ‘second’ centre of Russian emigration.

1930. Critical attacks on Nabokov’s writing begin in emigré circles. Publishes a novella The Eye.

1931. Publishes Glory, his fourth novel.

1932. Publishes Kamera Obskura – Laughter in the Dark.

1933. Begins work on The Gift. Hitler comes to power in Germany.

1934. Birth of Dmitri, Nabokov’s only son.

1935. Breaks off work on The Gift to write Invitation to a Beheading which appears serially, giving rise to much debate and controversy.

1936. Publication of Despair. A small circle of writers, critics, and readers begin to place VN’s work alongside other great modern Russian writers. Knowing he is likely to lose connection with his Russian emigre audience, he composes ‘Mademoiselle O’ – in French.

1937. The Gift begins to appear serially. The Nabokov’s move to Paris to escape the threat from Nazism. Nabokov becomes involved with La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, meets Jean Paulhan and James Joyce, and composes in French an essay on Pushkin entitled Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable. He begins an affair with Irina Guadanini.

1938. He writes two plays produced in Russian in Paris: Sobytia (The Event) and Izobretenie Wal’sa (The Waltz Invention). Begins writing The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – in English.

1939. Writes a novella The Enchanter, his first version of the Lolita story (which contradicts the account he gives in the introduction to Lolita).

1940. The Nabokovs leave for the United States on board the Champlain. He begins his lepidopteral studies at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Meets Edmund Wilson, who will introduce him to The New Yorker.

1941. One year appointment in comparative literature at Wellesley College. Publication of his first English novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

1942. Nabokov named researcher at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Teaches Russian literature three days a week at Wellesley College.

1943. Nabokov receives a Guggenheim Award.

1944. Publication of Nikolai Gogol and Three Russian Poets – translations of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tiutchev. Appointed lecturer at Wellesley College.

1945. Nabokov and his wife Véra become American citizens. His brother Sergey dies in Nazi concentration camp.

1947. Publication of Bend Sinister. Begins planning Lolita.

1948. Nabokov is offered and accepts a professorship of Russian literature at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

1951. He is a guest lecturer at Harvard. Publication of autobiography Conclusive Evidence.

1953. Second Guggenheim Award and American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. Finishes writing Lolita.

1954. Works on Pnin and his monumental translation of Eugene Onegin.

1955. Lolita, refused by four American publishers, is published in Paris by Olympia Press, run by Maurice Girodias, largely a pornographer.

1956. Publication of Vesna v Fial’te – 14 stories in Russian.

1957. Publication of Pnin.

1958. Publication of Dmitri and Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Nabokov’s Dozen (stories), and Lolita in the United States.

1959. Lolita becomes an international best-seller. Nabokov is able to resign from teaching in order to devote himself full time to creative writing. The family move to Switzerland, to be near Dmitri, who is studying opera in Italy.

1960. Publication of Nabokov’s translation of The Song of Igor’s Campaign. He writes a screenplay of Lolita for Stanley Kubrick. Begins Pale Fire.

1961. Moves into a suite of rooms in the Palace Hotel, Montreux – and stays there for the rest of his life.

1962. Publication of Pale Fire. The release of Stanley Kubrick’s film version of Lolita, starring James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers, and Sue Lyon. Nabokov makes the cover of Newsweek.

1964. Publication of his mammoth translation with commentary of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin – which becomes the subject of protracted controversy between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson.

1967. Publication of Speak, Memory. Publication of the first important critical works on Nabokov: Page Stegner’s Escape into Aesthetics and Andrew Field’s Nabokov, His Life in Art.

1969. Publication of Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle Nabokov makes the cover of Time magazine.

1972. Publication of Transparent Things.

1973. Publication of A Russian Beauty and Other Stories – 13 stories, some translated from the Russian, some written directly in English. Publication of Strong Opinions – interviews, criticism, essays, letters. Rift with his biographer Andrew Field.

1974. Publication of Lolita: A Screenplay, which was not used by Kubrick for the film. Publication of Look at the Harlequins.

1975. Publication of Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories – 14 stories, some from the Russian, some written in English.

1976. Publication of Details of a Sunset and Other Stories – 13 stories, translated from the Russian.

1977. Nabokov dies July 2 in Lausanne. He is buried in Clarens, beneath a tombstone that reads ‘Vladimir Nabokov, écrivain.’

More on Vladimir Nabokov
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Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

Vladimir Nabokov more short stories

July 18, 2012 by Roy Johnson

a critical study of Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories

In 1995 Dmitri Nabokov (the novelist’s son and translator) was preparing a collection of his father’s complete short stories for publication by Alfred A.Knopf in New York. He was able to include a number of early works which had not been available previously in English translation. Vladimir Nabokov had considered the idea of issuing his earlier unpublished or uncollected stories during his own lifetime, and he left behind a list of seven tales to which he gave the tongue-in-cheek title Bottom of the Barrel. His son eventually added some items that had been forgotten or lost. In the end, twelve additional stories were prepared for addition to those already available. The additional stories are listed below.

The earliest of these stories were written whilst Nabokov was still a student at Cambridge University, where he completed his education whilst the rest of the Nabokov family went to live in Germany. Many of these tales were published in the Russian émigré newspaper Rul’ (The Rudder) which his father had established in 1919 in Berlin – the ‘first’ centre of Russian emigration (Paris being the second).

I have not tried to insert these extra stories chronologically into the fifty stories already analysed in this online collection, so as not to disrupt their sequence and the continuity of argument in what was written some years ago. Instead, they will appear on this page with links, and on their main home page in alphabetical order.

> The Wood Sprite (1921)

> Russian Spoken Here (1923)

> Sounds (1923)

> Wingstroke (1924)

> Gods (1924)

> The Seaport (1924)

> Revenge (1924)

> Benificence (1924)

> La Veneziana (1924)

> The Dragon (1924)

> The Fight (1925)

> The Razor (1926)

> Solus Rex (1940)

> Ultima Thule (1942)

> Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster (1950)

Vladimir Nabokov links

Vladimir Nabokov – life and works

Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories – critical analyses

Vladimir Nabokov: an illustrated life

Vladimir Nabokov web links

December 10, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a selection of web-based archives and resources

This short selection of Vladimir Nabokov web links offers quick connections to resources for further study. It’s not comprehensive, and if you have any ideas for additional resources, please use the ‘Comments’ box below to make suggestions.

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, tutorials, study guides, videos, web links, and essays on the Complete Short Stories.

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, list of major works, bibliography, and web links

Lolita USA
A ‘geographical scrutiny’ of Humbert and Lolita’s journey across America. Essay and photographic study by Dieter E. Zimmer.

Vladimir Nabokov Writings – First Appearance
An illustrated collection of first editions in English. Photographs with bibliographical notes compiled by Bob Nelson

Vladimir Nabokov at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plot, box office, trivia, continuity errors, and quiz.

Zembla
Biography, timeline, photographs, eTexts, sound clips, butterflies, literary criticism, online journal, scholarly essays, and an online annotated version of Ada – housed at Pennsylkvania State University Library.

Nabokov Museum
A major collection housed in Nabokov’s old family home (now a museum) in St. Petersburg. – biography, photos, family home, videos in English and Russian.

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov held the unique distinction of being one of the most important writers of the twentieth century in two separate languages, Russian and English. This volume offers a concise and informative introduction into the author’s fascinating creative world. Specially commissioned essays by distinguished scholars illuminate numerous facets of the writer’s legacy, from his early contributions as a poet and short-story writer to his dazzling achievements as one of the most original novelists of the twentieth century. Topics receiving fresh coverage include Nabokov’s narrative strategies, the evolution of his world-view, and his relationship to the literary and cultural currents of his day. The volume also contains valuable supplementary material such as a chronology of the writer’s life and a guide to further critical reading.
Buy the book here

More on Vladimir Nabokov
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Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

Washington Square

March 24, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study resources, film version, and web links

Washington Square (1880) is a short novel originally published as a serial in Cornhill Magazine and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. It is a structurally simple tragicomedy that recounts the conflict between a dull but sweet daughter and her brilliant, domineering father. She has a handsome young suitor – but the father disapproves of him. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant town house. Who wins out in the end? You will be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, with a sensitive picture of a woman’s life. The plot of the novel is based upon a true story told to James by his close friend, the British actress Fanny Kemble. The book is often compared to Jane Austen’s work for the clarity and grace of its prose and its intense focus on family relationships.

first American edition 1880

Washington Square – plot summary

Dr. Austin Sloper is a rich and intelligent widower who lives in Washington Square, New York with his only surviving child, Catherine. She is a sweet-natured woman who is a great disappointment to her father, being physically plain and, he believes, mentally dull. Sloper’s beloved wife, along with a promising young son, died many years before. His busybody sister, the widowed Lavinia Penniman, is the only other member of the doctor’s household.

One day, Catherine meets the charming Morris Townsend at a party and is swept off her feet. Morris courts Catherine, aided by Mrs. Penniman, who loves melodrama. Dr. Sloper strongly disapproves, believing him to be after Catherine’s money. When Catherine and Morris announce their engagement, he checks into Morris’s background and finds him to be penniless and parasitic. The doctor forbids his daughter to marry Townsend, and the loyal Catherine cannot bring herself to choose between her father and her fiancé.

Dr. Sloper understands Catherine’s strait and pities her a little, but also finds an urbane entertainment in the situation. In an effort to resolve the matter, he announces that he will not leave any money to Catherine if she marries Morris. He then takes her on a twelve month grand tour of Europe to distract her attention from Townsend.

During their months abroad, he mentions Catherine’s engagement only twice; once while they are alone together in the Alps, and again on the eve of their return voyage. On both occasions, Catherine holds firm in her desire to marry. After she refuses for a second time to give Morris up, Sloper sarcastically compares her to a sheep fattened up for slaughter. With this, he finally goes too far: Catherine recognises his contempt, withdraws from him, and prepares to bestow all her love and loyalty on Morris.

Upon their return however, when Catherine convinces her fiance that her father will never relent, Townsend breaks off the relationship. Catherine is devastated, then eventually recovers her equanimity, but is never able to forget the injury.

Many years pass. Catherine refuses two respectable offers of marriage and grows into a middle aged spinster. Dr. Sloper finally dies and leaves her a sharply reduced income in his will out of fear that Townsend will reappear. In fact, Morris – now fat, balding, cold-eyed, but still somewhat attractive – does eventually pay a call on Catherine, hoping to effect a reconcilation. But she calmly rebuffs his overtures. The novel concludes with “Catherine … picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again — for life, as it were.”

Study resources

Washington Square – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Washington Square – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Washington Square – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Washington Square – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Washington Square – Brodie’s Notes

Washington Square – York Notes

Washington Square – 1998 film adaptation on DVD

Washington Square – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Washington Square – audioBook (unabridged) at Amazon UK

Washington Square – audioBook at LibriVox

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James – biographical notes

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Principal characters

Dr Austin Sloper	a successful, rich, and satirical doctor
Catherine Sloper	his unmarried daughter
Lavinia Penniman	Catherine’s intefering widowed aunt
Morris Townsend	a handsome young fortune-hunter
Mrs Almond	Sloper’s married sister
Marian Almond	Mrs Almond’s vivacious daughter
Mrs Montgomery	Morris Townsend’s impoverished sister

Washiongton Square – film version

1949 William Wyler screen adaptation

An all star cast of Olivia de Havilland as Catherine, Ralph Richardson as Doctor Sloper, and Montgomery Clift as Morris Townsend. Aaron Copland is credited with having composed the theme music, but he denied it.

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database.

Film version

1949 William Wyler screen adaptation

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database.

Other works by Henry James

The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Daisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

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Wessex Tales

May 10, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tragic and comic tales of the rural past

Thomas Hardy is one of the few major novelists (D.H.Lawrence was another) who is equally celebrated as a poet and a writer of short stories. Wessex Tales is a collection of his best-known tales which he shaped and re-shaped during his lifetime. It gathers together incidents, anecdotes, and folk memories which record the passing of an old rural era which Hardy captures with his customary sense of drama, his powerful language, and his wonderful depiction of the English countryside. All of these qualities make him an enduring favourite with the common reader.

The stories seem to exist in three simultaneous time zones. Their events capture the social history, the practices, beliefs, and language of the early nineteenth century which Hardy was keen to document before they disappeared from living memory. They were written in the late nineteenth century and contain many of the literary devices of that period for which Hardy is famous – the use of fateful and tragic coincidences, plots which strain credulity, and a post-Darwinian sense of tragedy which pervades almost all of his work. Yet there are also elements of modern sensibility that reflect the fact that Hardy did in fact live for almost three decades as part of the twentieth century, and was personally acquainted with modernists such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf.

Those people familiar with Hardy’s novels will recognise his use of traditional and melodramatic plot devices in these stories. The young country girl who arranges to elope with a dashing soldier, but at the very meeting point overhears a man from her past and changes her mind – with tragic consequences for her and for the soldier. A christening party interrupted by the arrival of two strangers, who turn out to be an escaped convict and the hangman who has been summoned to execute him.

One of the most interesting stories (Fellow Townsmen) is set, unusually for Hardy, not in the countryside but in a manufacturing Dorset town (Bridport) amongst businessmen, a solicitor, and the local doctor. It concerns a number of Hardy’s favourite themes – the building of a house (a symbol of prosperity and status) an unhappy marriage, a former sweetheart who marries the hero’s best friend, and a series of missed opportunities which lead to a bleak outcome for all concerned.

These are correctly entitled ‘tales’ rather than ‘stories’ because they lack some of the compression and singularity of purpose we expect in a story – long or short. They have instead multiple characters, locations, and incidents. Some even have chapters with descriptive titles, and are almost like scenarios which might easily have been fleshed out into full length novels had Hardy felt the inclination to do so.

At a biographical level of comment and interpretation, it’s notable that many of the stories turn around matters of improvident, unhappy, and second marriages. We know that Hardy was less than content in his relationship with Emma, his first wife, but these stories were written twenty years or more before he met Florence Dugdale, with whom he formed his second and no more successful marriage. It’s almost as if he is exploring unconsciously these issues in advance of living them out, just as he did in his later novels. Tess of the d’Urbervilles has a heroine who is deserted on her wedding night. The Mayor of Casterbridge has a hero who sells his wife. And Jude the Obscure is the story of a man who marries twice – both times without success.

But whatever the plot, all these stories are imbued with that profound love and understanding of the countryside for which Hardy is rightly famous. He has a perception which combines historical consciousness, scientific accuracy, and a lyrical evocation of his native Dorsetshire which is truly poetic:

They were travelling in a direction that was enlivened by no modern current of traffic, the place of Darnton’s pilgrimage being an old-fashioned village – one of the Hintocks (several villages of that name, with distinctive prefix or affix, lying thereabout) – where people make the best cider and cider-wine in all Wessex, and where the dunghills smell of pommace instead of stable refuse as elsewhere. The lane was sometimes so narrow that the brambles of the hedge, which hung forward like anglers’ rods over a stream, scratched their hats and hooked their whiskers as they passed. Yet this neglected lane had been a highway to Queen Elizabeth’s subjects and the cavalcades of the past. Its day was over now, and its history as a national artery done forever

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Thomas Hardy, Wessex Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.248, ISBN: 0199538522

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What is close reading?

September 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a brief guide to advanced reading skills

Close reading – explained

1. Close reading is the most important skill you need for any form of literary studies. It means paying especially close attention to what is printed on the page. It is a much more subtle and complex process than the term might suggest.

2. Close reading means not only reading and understanding the meanings of the individual printed words; it also involves making yourself sensitive to all the nuances and connotations of a language as it is used by skilled writers.

3. This can mean anything from a work’s particular vocabulary, sentence construction, and imagery, to the themes that are being dealt with, the way in which the story is being told, and the view of the world that it offers. It involves almost everything from the smallest linguistic items to the largest issues of literary understanding and judgement.

4. Close reading can be seen as four separate levels of attention which we can bring to the text. Most normal people read without being aware of them, and employ all four simultaneously. The four levels or types of reading become progressively more complex.

Linguistic
You pay especially close attention to the surface linguistic elements of the text – that is, to aspects of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. You might also note such things as figures of speech or any other features which contribute to the writer’s individual style.
Semantic
You take account at a deeper level of what the words mean – that is, what information they yield up, what meanings they denote and connote.
Structural
You note the possible relationships between words within the text – and this might include items from either the linguistic or semantic types of reading.
Cultural
You note the relationship of any elements of the text to things outside it. These might be other pieces of writing by the same author, or other writings of the same type by different writers. They might be items of social or cultural history, or even other academic disciplines which might seem relevant, such as philosophy or psychology.

5. Close reading is not a skill which can be developed to a sophisticated extent overnight. It requires a lot of practice in the various linguistic and literary disciplines involved – and it requires that you do a lot of reading. The good news is that most people already possess the skills required. They have acquired them automatically through being able to read – even though they haven’t been conscious of doing so.

This is rather like many other things which we learn unconsciously. After all, you don’t need to know the names of your leg muscles in order to walk down the street.

Studying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and technical terms you need when making a study of stories and novels. It shows you how to understand literary analysis by explaining its elements one at a time, then showing them at work in short stories which are reproduced as part of the book. Topics covered include – setting, characters, story, point of view, symbolism, narrators, theme, construction, metaphors, irony, prose style, tone, close reading, and interpretation. The book also contains self-assessment exercises, so you can check your understanding of each topic. It was written by the same author as the guidance notes on this page that you are reading right now.

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6. The four types of reading also represent increasingly complex and sophisticated phases in our scrutiny of the text.

Linguistic reading is largely descriptive. We are noting what is in the text and naming its parts for possible use in the next stage of reading.
Semantic reading is cognitive. That is, we need to understand what the words are telling us – both at a surface and maybe at an implicit level.
Structural reading is analytic. We must assess, examine, sift, and judge a large number of items from within the text in their relationships to each other.
Cultural reading is interpretive. We offer judgements on the work in its general relationship to a large body of cultural material outside it.

7. The first and second of these stages are the sorts of activity designated as ‘Beginners’ level; the third takes us to ‘Intermediate’; and the fourth to ‘Advanced’ and beyond.

8. One of the first things you need to acquire for serious literary study is a knowledge of the vocabulary, the technical language, indeed the jargon in which literature is discussed. You need to acquaint yourself with the technical vocabulary of the discipline and then go on to study how its parts work.

9. What follows is a short list of features you might keep in mind whilst reading. They should give you ideas of what to look for. It is just a prompt to help you get under way.

Close reading – Checklist

Grammar
The relationships of the words in sentences
Vocabulary
The author’s choice of individual words
Figures of speech
The rhetorical devices used to give decoration and imaginative expression to literature, such as simile or metaphor
Literary devices
The devices commonly used in literature to give added depth to the work, such as imagery or symbolism
Tone
The author’s attitude to the subject as revealed in the manner of the writing
Style
The author’s particular choice and combination of all these features of writing which creates a recognisable and distinctive manner of writing

Close reading – Example

10. Now here’s an example of close reading in action. The short passage which follows comes from the famous opening to Charles Dickens‘ Bleak House.

11. If you would like to treat this as an interactive exercise, read the passage through a number of times. Make notes, and write down all you can say about what goes to make up its literary ‘quality’. That is, you should scrutinise the passage as closely as possible, name its parts, and say what devices the author is using. Don’t be afraid to list even the most obvious points.

12. If you are not really sure what all this means however, allow yourself a brief glance ahead at the first couple of discussion notes which follow, and then come back to carry on making notes of your own.

13. Don’t worry if you are not sure what name to give to any feature you notice. You will see the technical vocabulary being used in the discussion notes which follow, and this should help you pick up this skill as we go along.

Bleak House

London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

Close reading

14. This is the sort of writing which many people, asked for their first impressions, would say was very ‘descriptive’. But if you looked at it closely enough you will have seen that it is imaginative rather than descriptive. It doesn’t ‘describe what is there’ – but it invents images and impressions. There is as much “it was as if …” material in the extract as there is anything descriptive. What follows is a close reading of the extract, with comments listed in the order that they appear in the extract.

London
This is an abrupt and astonishingly short ‘sentence’ with which to start a six hundred page novel. In fact technically, it is grammatically incomplete, because it does not have a verb or an object. It somehow implies the meaning ‘The scene is London.’

Sentence construction
In fact each of the first four sentences here are ‘incomplete’ in this sense. Dickens is taking liberties with conventional grammar – and obviously he is writing for a literate and fairly sophisticated readership.

Sentence length
These four sentences vary from one word to forty-three words in length. This helps to create entertaining variation and robust flexibility in his prose style.

Michaelmas Term
There are several names (proper nouns) in these sentences, all signalled by capital letters (London, Michaelmas Term, Lord Chancellor, Lincoln’s Inn Hall, November, Holborn Hill). This helps to create the very credible and realistic world Dickens presents in his fiction. We believe that this is the same London which we could visit today. The names also emphasise the very specific and concrete nature of the world he creates.

Michaelmas Term
This occurs in autumn. It comes from the language of the old universities (Oxford and Cambridge) which is shared by the legal profession and the Church.

Lord Chancellor sitting
Here ‘sitting’ is a present participle. The novel is being told in the present tense at this point, which is rather unusual. The effect is to give vividness and immediacy to the story. We are being persuaded that these events are taking place now.

Implacable
This is an unusual and very strong term to describe the weather. It means ‘that which cannot be appeased’. What it reflects is Dickens’s genius for making almost everything in his writing original, striking, and dramatic.

as if
This is the start of his extended simile comparing the muddy streets with the primeval world.

the waters
There is a slight Biblical echo here, which also fits neatly with the idea of an ancient world he is summoning up.

but newly and wonderful
These are slightly archaic expressions. We might normally expect ‘recently’ and ‘astonishing’ but Dickens is selecting his vocabulary to suit the subject – the prehistoric world. ‘Wonderful’ is being used in its original sense of – ‘something we wonder at’.

forty feet long or so
After the very specific ‘forty feet long’, the addition of ‘or so’ introduces a slightly conversational tone and a casual, almost comic effect.

waddling
This reinforces the humorous manner in which Dickens is presenting this Megalosaurus – and note the breadth of his vocabulary in naming the beast with such scientific precision.

like an elephantine lizard
This is another simile, announced by the word ‘like’. Here is Dickens’s skill with language yet again. He converts a ‘large’ noun (‘elephant’) into an adjective (‘elephantine’) and couples it to something which is usually small (‘lizard’) to describe, very appropriately it seems, his Megalosaurus.

up Holborn Hill
There is a distinct contrast, almost a shock here, in this abrupt transition from an imagined prehistoric world and its monsters to the ‘real’ world of Holborn in London.

lowering
This is another present participle, and an unusual verb. It means ‘to sink, descend, or slope downwards’. It comes from a rather ‘poetic’ verbal register, and it has a softness (there are no sharp or harsh sounds in it) which makes it very suitable for describing the movement of smoke.

soft black drizzle
He is comparing the dense smoke (from coal fires) with another form of particularly depressing atmosphere – a drizzle of rain. Notice how he goes on to elaborate the comparison.

as big as full grown snow flakes
The comparison becomes another simile: ‘as big as’. And then ‘full grown’ almost suggests that the snowflakes are human. This is a device much favoured by Dickens: it is called ‘anthropomorphism’ – attributing human qualities or characteristics to things which are themselves inanimate. Then ‘snowflakes’ is a well-observed comparison for an enlarged flake of soot, because they are of similar size and texture. Notice next how Dickens immediately goes on to play with the notion that whilst soot is black, snowflakes are white.

gone into mourning
This reinforces the anthropomorphism. The inanimate world is being brought to life. And of course ‘mourning’ reinforces the atmospheric gloom he is trying to evoke. It also introduces blackness (the colour of mourning) to explain how these snowflakes (actually flakes of soot) might have changed from white to black.

the death of the sun
This is why the flakes have changed colour. And if the sun has died the light and life it brings to earth have also been extinguished – which reinforces the atmosphere of pre-historic darkness he is creating.

15. We will stop at this point. It would in fact be possible to say even more about the extract if we were to relate it to the novel as a whole – but almost everything listed was accessible even if you were reading the passage for the first time.

16. Literary studies are not conducted in such detail all the time, but it is very important that you try to develop the skill of reading as closely as possible. It really is the foundation on which everything else is based.

17. The next point to make about such close reading is that it becomes easier if you get used to the idea of reading and re-reading. The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov (famous for Lolita) once observed that “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only re-read it”.

18. What he meant by this apparently contradictory remark is that the first time we read a book we are busy absorbing information, and we cannot appreciate all the subtle connexions there may be between its parts – because we don’t yet have the complete picture before us. Only when we read it for a second time (or even better, a third or fourth) are we in a position to assemble and compare the nuances of meaning and the significance of its details in relation to each other.

19. This is why the activity is called ‘close reading’. You should try to get used to the notion of reading and re-reading very carefully, scrupulously, and in great detail.

20. Finally, let’s try to dispel a common misconception. Many people ask, when they first come into contact with close reading: “Doesn’t analysing a piece of work in such detail spoil your enjoyment of it?” The answer to this question is “No – on the contrary – it should enhance it.” The simple fact is that we get more out of a piece of writing if we can appreciate all the subtleties and the intricacies which exist within it. Nabokov also suggested that “In reading, one should notice and fondle the details”.

Sample close reading of Katherine Mansfield’s The Voyage

Sample close reading of Virginia Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday

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What is Literature?

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

classic statement of literature and political commitment

What is Literature? is a now-famous polemic, written in 1948 following the turmoil of the second world war. Sartre was coming into his own as the most influential philosopher and writer of the existentialist movement. He thinks out loud in his customary [slightly rambling] fashion about the role of the writer in the post-war world. What he was trying to do was reconcile and even fuse his impulses towards writing and politics. In the first part he discusses the differences between literature and other arts such as music and painting.

His argument is that prose writing is different than all other media because of the relationship between the individual and language itself. We might not know anything about musical scales for instance, but we cannot not know about language. At this point fifty years on, we are unlikely to agree with all his conclusions, but his engagement with the relationship between writing and society is certainly thought-provoking.

In the next part he deals with ‘Why We Write’. There are some fascinating and vigorous reflections on the psychology of writing and reading – some of which anticipate forms of literary criticism which were not developed until twenty years later. For instance, he explains that the meaning of writing remains only latent until it is brought alive in the reader’s mind – and his observation that “reading is directed creation” is Reader-Response Theory summed up in four words.

It’s a long, tough-minded argument, much of it drifting into the realms of philosophy. Some of the weaknesses in his argument come from over-generalising particular cases. There’s also lots of argument spun out of abstract and metaphysical notions such as ‘freedom’ and ‘commitment’ which were fashionable at the time.

The centre of the book is a long meditation on the relationship between writers and their readers. This is largely a tour through French literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

He finishes with a chapter on the role of the writer in 1948. This is a passionate and well-argued plea for social engagement on the part of the writer. It also debates the temptations and the reasons for resisting the call of the Left (which at that time was the Communist Party).

You have to be prepared for a lot of history and politics, but ultimately this is a robust and bracing read which should be of interest to anybody who wants to think about the relationship between ideology and literary culture.

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Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature, (first pub 1948) London: Routledge, 2001, pp.251, ISBN: 0415254043

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What Kind of Day Did You Have?

August 2, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, web links, and further reading

What Kind of Day Did You Have? (1984) is one of five pieces in the collection Him with his Foot in his Mouth. It first appeared in slightly different form in Vanity Fair. The story is a fictional account of a single day in the lives of two real people Saul Bellow knew well. It reveals the personal tensions and the dramatic situations that arise during a clandestine love affair, set against the backdrop of a midwinter journey by plane between New York State and Chicago.

The four other stories in the collection are Him with his Foot in his Mouth, A Silver Dish, Cousins, and Zetland: By A Character Witness.

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – commentary

Fiction and biography

Saul Bellow often uses real historical figures as the models for his fictional characters. His friend and mentor Delmore Schwartz was the original for the protagonist of his early success Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and his colleague the philosopher Allan Bloom was the inspiration for his last novel Ravelstein (2000). The character Victor Wulpy in What Kind of Day Did You Have? is based on Harold Rosenberg, someone whom Bellow knew from his early days associated with left-wing magazines such as Partisan Review. Rosenberg was a writer, a social philosopher, and art critic for the New Yorker magazine.

These characters are often eccentric, larger-than-life, and an entertaining mixture of talent and gaucheness. Bellow pulls no punches in depicting both their strengths and weaknesses in unsparing detail. They all tend to be great talkers, and the narratives in which they feature are packed with their racy, egotistical monologues.

This blending of historical ‘fact’ and fiction raises a number of problems for literary interpretation and judgement. Readers will have an understandable inclination to believe that the portraits and episodes in the fiction are accurate, true, and based on ‘real events’. Yet the author is under no obligation to make them so. A novel or a story declares itself from the outset to be a fabrication, and there is nothing to prevent authors from blending fiction and historical ‘fact’ in any way they choose.

We know from external evidence that Wulpy and his mistress Katrina are based on Harold Rosenberg and a woman called Joan Ullman with whom he had an affair. But as a piece of writing, the story must be judged on internal (that is fictional) evidence alone. Any comment which takes into account evidence from the lives of the ‘originals’ of the characters becomes biographical comment.

It is also rather pointless searching in works of fiction for character studies of real historical people. Novels are not written for this purpose – and they should be taken at their own face value. Even serious biographies are literary constructs – though the best are founded on verifiable evidence.

Characterisation

It should be quite clear that Victor Wulpy is being offered to us as some sort of loveable rogue – an oversized rascal who speaks his mind and is quite prepared to offend others in doing so. He is also a famous intellectual who can earn enormous public-speaking fees.

But he was a talker, he had to talk, and during those wide-ranging bed conversations (monologues) when he let himself go, he couldn’t stop to explain himself … As he went on, he was more salty, scandalous, he was murderous. Reputations were destroyed when he got going, and people were torn to bits. So-and-so was a plagiarist who did not know what to steal, X who was a philosopher was a chorus boy at heart, Y had a mind like a lazy Susan, six spoiled appetisers and no main course.

But the problem in the case of Victor Wulpy is that his philosophic originality is largely told and not shown. That is to say, we are told how radical, freewheeling, and scandalous his private opinions are, but they are not dramatised. We are not sufficiently shown those opinions in action.

What we are shown is an enormous amount of self-centred, boorish behaviour, and male chauvinism bordering on the pathological.

Wulpy like the original Harold Rosenberg is a self-styled bohemian who pours scorn on all conventional opinions and behaviour. Rosenberg was the man who coined the expression ‘the tradition of the new’. And yet both the historical Rosenberg and the fictional Wulpy are living the life of an old-fashioned Victorian patriarch. Wulpy keeps a long-suffering wife in the background whom he refuses to divorce; and he has a lover/mistress whom he picks up and puts down again at his own convenience.

The female character Katrina Goliger is based on the journalist Joan Ullman, who has written her own account of the relationship with Rosenberg:

Bellow had pillaged key incidents from my life, which should have been mine to tell … It’s only been recently, that for the first time the true cost—the steep price I’d paid to be with Harold—struck home.

Yet despite the understandable outrage at having her personal life made the subject of fiction (for which permission was not sought) her own description of the affair is remarkably similar to that in Bellow’s story. The fictional Katrina comes across as a very willing doormat on which Wulpy wipes his size sixteen feet.

Is it a novella?

The strongest feature in favour of the piece being considered a novella is its unity of time and action. The events of the narrative take place over exactly a single day. They begin one evening in Chicago when Katrina is having dinner with her would-be suitor Krieggstein. On receiving a telephone call from Wulpy, she flies to Buffalo to join him. They then fly back to Chicago, with an enforced stop-over in Detroit. The story ends in the early evening, twenty-four hours later, back at her home, where she is reunited with Krieggstein.

The story has two principal characters, Wulpy and Katrina, who are locked in a very conventional power struggle. He is using her for sexual convenience whilst maintaining his independence from her – with a wife safely tucked away in the background. She feels vulnerable as a single mother and is looking for emotional commitment. This tension between them is brought to a climax when their return flight hits dangerous turbulence. Even as they think they might die, Wulpy refuses to say he loves her – because he thinks it is such a situational cliché.

The story ends in an apparently unresolved state. Wulpy goes on to give his lecture; Katrina is met by Krieggstein, who has been supervising her children after school. Krieggstein is present at the beginning and end of the story and the day, offering her devotion and support. This suggests in terms of fictional convention and logic that her future lies with him. As a policeman he might have a concealed firearm strapped to his leg, but at least he will come home every night – unlike Wulpy.

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – resources

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

A Saul Bellow bibliography

Harold Rosenberg at Wikipedia

Joan Ullman’s side of the story

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – synopsis

Famous but egocentric art critic Victor Wulpy is in an adulterous relationship with Katrina Goliger. Her husband has divorced her, and she is left with two teenage daughters. Whilst she is having dinner with her friend Lieutenant Krieggstein, Wulpy telephones, insisting she travel from Chicago to Buffalo to join him.

Katrina is vigorously chided by her sister Dorothea for tolerating Wulpy’s self-centred demands. Katrina gets up before dawn and flies to Buffalo. Wulpy is petulantly distressed because he will be sharing a conference platform with people he does not like.

In the VIP lounge he makes political analyses of America from what he claims is a Marxist point of view. He is powerfully attracted to Katrina even though he realises that there is an intellectual gap between them. They are joined by Larry Wrangel, an old bohemian associate of Wulpy’s who wants him to consider some hippy political views.

On the flight back to Chicago Katrina thinks about the children’s story about an elephant she is trying to write. Wulpy reflects on memories of his Jewish childhood. The plane is forced to land in Detroit because of heavy snow in Chicago.

Larry Wrangel turns up again and takes them to lunch, where Wulpy turns on his ingratiating host with insults. Katrina and Wulpy stay in a hotel room and have sex whilst they are waiting for an emergency rescue flight.

They then fly on to Chicago, Katrina recalling Wulpy’s recent near-death operation, and her being tolerated by his wife Beila. Their light plane hits turbulence, and they think they might crash, but even in what might be their last moments, Wulpy refuses to say “I love you” to Katrina.

She eventually reaches home to find that her friend Krieggstein has been looking after her children and is obviously hoping to become her suitor.

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – characters

Victor Wulpy	an egocentric art critic and theorist
Beila Wulpy	his stoical and ‘understanding’ wife
Katrina Goliger	his lover, a mother with two children
Alfred Goliger	Katrina’s ex-husband, a dealer in antiques
Dorothea	Katrina’s outspoken sister
Sammy Krieggstein	a war hero and lieutenant in the police force
Larry Wrangel	a writer and sci-fi film maker

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