[Se lo recomiendo...] Nabokov, el autor de Lolita, dictó clases en universidades, y aquí está parte de su material (con fotos incluidas de sus borradores).
Él reflexionó sobre qué es ser un buen lector, la ficción y el sentido común, pero también analizó cómo grandes escritores europeos estructuraron sus novelas: Jane Austen (con Mansfield Park), Charles Dickens (Casa desolada), Stevenson (El extraño caso del Dr. Jekyll y Mr. Hyde), Marcel Proust (En busca del tiempo perdido: Por el camino de Swann), Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Kafka (La metamorfosis) y Joyce (Ulises).
Considero que puede ser tedioso en algunas partes. Y creo que, para aquel que no haya leído todas esas novelas (me incluyo), este libro podría dar una buena idea sobre qué trata cada una de ellas.

Über einen längeren Zeitraum möchte ich die einzelnen Vorlesungen und die darin besprochenen Bücher nebeneinander lesen. Den Beginn wird Mansfield Park von Jane Austen machen.
31.10.2015 Und so lese ich abwechselnd einmal in der Vorlesung und im Roman.
31.10.2015 Die Doppellektüre war eine gelungene Veranstaltung. Nabokov macht mit vielen klugen und wunderbar formulierten (unglaublich wunderbar formuliert - unbedingt Nabokov lesen)auf Details und Feinheiten aber auch Beschleunigungen und Auslassungen aufmerksam.
1.12.2015 Nabokov widmet auch Stevensons Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde eine eigene Vorlesung. Zuerst war ich verwundert aber nach der Lektüre dieser längeren Erzählung kann ich die Wahl gut verstehen. Diese Vorlesung ist eine sehr ausführliche Darstellung des Textes mit sehr wenigen Deutungsversuchen und Testauslegungen. Trotzdem interessant. Die Vorlesung endet mit "...in seinem wunderbarsten Buch".
Das kann ich jetzt noch nicht beurteilen, weil ich noch viel zu wenig Stevenson gelesen habe - aber das werde ich noch nachholen.
09.01.2016 Madame Bovary gelesen. Nabokov schreibt gleich in der Einleitung über Madame Bovary: "Von allen Märchen in dieser Vorlesungsreihe ist Flauberts Madame Bovary das romantischste. Stilistisch handelt es sich um Prosa, die leistet, was Lyrik leisten soll". Und so gestaltet sich auch die Durcharbeitung des des Textes. Diese Erörterung ist sehr umfangreich, immer geistreich und nie langweilig. Spätestens nach der Lektüre dieser Vorlesung "muss" man Madame Bovary lesen.
10.02.2016 Jetzt Bleakhaus von Dickens - ich freue mich ja schon so darauf und neugierig bin ich und ungeduldig...
10.03.2016 Soeben die Vorlesung noch einmal sozusagen in einem Schluck gelesen. Wunderbar wie Nabokov Huldigung und Analyse in diese Vorlesung gepackt hat. Schwächen des Romans benennt er ohne nur den geringsten Zweifel an der hohen Qualität des Textes aufkommen zu lassen. Dickens verleitet ihn auch sehr grundsätzliches zur Literatur anzumerken. Zum Beispiel: "Literatur handelt nicht von etwas: Sie ist dieses Etwas selbst, ihre eigene Wesenheit". Das gefällt mir sehr.
30.06.2016 Franz Kafka Die Verwandlung
Nabokov kniet vor Kafka und dieser Erzählung (und ich mit ihm). Zitat: "Er ist der größte deutsche Schriftsteller unserer Zeit. Im Vergleich zu ihm sind Lyriker wie Rilke oder Romanciers wie Thomas Mann Zwerge und Gipsheilige.
02.07.2016 James Joyce Ulysses - Ulysses kannte ich ja bereits und mit Nabokov nochmals durch den Roman zu wandeln war sehr aufschlussreich. Einzlene Kapitel aus Ulysses werde ich wohl gelegentlich wieder nachlesen.
12.07.2016 Marcel Proust In Swanns Welt - Über meine unbedingte Liebe zu Proust möchte ich mich gar nicht auslassen nur die Anmerkung sei erlaubt das Nabokov Proust weit über Joyce stellt. Mein Buch für die Insel wäre natürlich und unbedingt: Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit.
15.07.2016 Nabokovs Vortrag: Die Kunst der Literatur und der Normalverstand - Großartiger Text. Was ist Inspiration und Genie? Wie entsteht Literatur - große Literatur. Alleine schon dieser amüsant-kluge Text ist den Kauf des Buches wert. Seine Wahrheit und Originalität sind unübertrefflich wie zum Beispiel: "Der Normalverstand hat schon so sanftmütiges Genie niedergetrampelt, dessen Augen sich am verfrühten Mondenstrahl einer verfrühten Wahreit erfreuten". Oder etwas später im Text: "wollen wir den Sonderling seligpreisen; denn in der natürlichen Evolution der Dinge wäre der Affe wohl niemals zum Menschen geworden, wenn nicht ein Sonderling aufgetaucht wäre..." So schön wie lesenswert wie bedenkenswert.

"La letteratura non è nata il giorno in cui un ragazzino corse via dalla valle di Neanderthal inseguito da un grande lupo grigio, gridando "Al lupo, al lupo" : è nata il giorno in cui un ragazzino, correndo, gridò "Al lupo, al lupo" senza avere nessun lupo alle calcagna."
3 stelle e mezzo.

was surprised by how useless this was. all lectures open with complaints about what an historian or Marxist might be attentive to in the novels of Joyce, Flaubert or Austen. everyday life in late-colonial Ireland, the bourgeois mentalités of post-restoration France, the spectre the Napoleonic wars cast over the British middle class, all very basic and important themes in Ulysses, Madame Bovary and Mansfield Park, which is no way close us off from weighing up their aesthetic effects. Nabokov will have none of it. like all aesthetes he's working very very hard to shove everything that he regards as inappropriate for the reader or critic off the stage, while preaching a hollow doctrine of open-mindedness. Once he's buried socio-historical criticism, what does he have to offer us? Plot summary, and long, long quotations.

uneori mi-a placut la nebunie, alteori, nabokov, mi-a venit sa-ti dau cu ceva in cap

Her biri farkli sehirlerde yasayan bir arkadas grubuyla pandemi boyunca aylara yayilan online bulusmalarimiza bahane olan bu kitabin bendeki yeri ayri. Okudugum en iyi metin (Swann'larin Tarafi ilk 40 sayfa) ve en iyi romanin (Ulysses) dahil oldugu yedi romani sirasiyla okuduk. Nabokov'un edebiyata bakisi keskin ve kapsayiciliktan uzak, ancak liste harika. Gerci Stevenson'un ne isi var hala anlamis degilim. Tuglalari devirdim ama minicik Jekyll and Hyde'i kotaramadim :)

A possible nightmare scenario if I had continued to follow the path of literature: teaching at a second-tier private college a course of modern fiction, and lecturing to students why William S. Burroughs, in his novel Queer, assumes a Proustian narrator writing in imitation of Hemingway, with a minor tangent disquisition on why American sexual language differs from the European notion of comradeship and assorted diatribes of sexual politics for my female undergraduates I secretly desire. Really, Nabokov makes it plain in these pages that he feels literature serves no important knowledge-role in either in science, psychology or philosophy, and this leads me to believe that this is a widespread and endemic view of the art and cultural life of the world since the second World War and has led to a narrowing and, simultaneously, a provincializing of our intellectual horizons which is reflected in the types of authors whose books are now celebrated in the pantheons of modern academia. A writer is celebrated today as someone who has something to say either because he or she represents a repressed minority, such as Chinua Achebe or Maya Angelou, or because he or she is a symbol for the misunderstood and Romantic geniuses of the past who, in a previous age, would have been condemned for their sexual depravities (i.e. John Ashbery and Edmund White). Three stars.

A difficult, taxing, somewhat exhausting text to plow thru. Yet, I want to believe I got something in return for my labor. I learned something about Nabokov: He loves art for art's sake, loves Flaubert, hates philistines.

The Editor's Foreword (3700 words) by Fredson Bowers and Introduction (4700 words) by John Updike are both very good. well worth reading. So, too, are the shorter lectures by Nabokov, "Good Readers and Good Writers" (2500 words), "The Art of Literature 
and Commonsense" (4500 words), and "L'Envoi" (600 words). If readers pass on his Charles Dickens lecture (27,000 words), I'd say they should not skip the shorter essays cited above.

In the Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, Stevenson, Proust, Kafka, and Joyce lectures Nabokov is less interested in using the text as launching-pads for riffing on aspects of the novel than he is for anatomizing sentences & paragraphs.

Vlad's like a coroner. He heaps the carcass of these novels onto his examination table and then starts eviscerating them, reading aloud long passages to his assembled lecture hall of students to draw attention to how various aspects of the novel's anatomy "work" as a whole.

I picture him in my mind's eye like a mad doctor, down in his Bat Cave, performing experiments, drawing up diagrams of Dublin's streets or insect physiology, disassembling, tearing apart the internal organs of stories—a liver here, a pancreas there, a gallbladder down the road—to show future coroners how, say, gastrointestinal systems are inextricably linked to nervous systems.

Riffing on Mansfield Park he says:

"the beauty of a book is more enjoyable if one understands its machinery, if one can take it apart. Jane Austen uses four methods of characterization in the beginning of the book. There is, first, the direct description...." And later, "a third method of characterization is through reported speech."

How much of that—excluding those seeking How-To instruction—can anyone take?

Vlad's focus is on operations, the machinery of storytelling, not so much aesthetic appreciation. For him, great novels are exquisitely engineered devices, like wrist-watches, or butterflys.

More later.

"We shall discuss Madame Bovary as Flaubert intended it to be discussed: in terms of structures (mouvements as he termed them), thematic lines, style, poetry, and characters. The novel consists of thirty-five chapters, each about ten pages long...."

"Three forces make and mold a human being: heredity, environment, and the unknown agent X. Of these the second, environment, is by far the least important, while the last, agent X, is by far the most influential.

"We are told that most of the characters in Madame Bovary are bourgeois. But one thing that we should clear up once and for all is the meaning that Flaubert gives to the term bourgeois. Unless it simply means townsman, as it often does in French, the term bourgeois as used by Flaubert means “philistine,” people preoccupied with the material side of life and believing only in conventional values. He never uses the word bourgeois with any politico-economic Marxist connotation. Flaubert’s bourgeois is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. In a famous scene of our book when a hardworking old woman, getting a medal for having slaved for her farmer-boss, is confronted with a committee of relaxed bourgeois beaming at her—mind you, in that scene both parties are philistines, the beaming politicians and the superstitious old peasant woman—both sides are bourgeois in Flaubert’s sense. I shall clear up the term completely if I say that, for instance, today in communist Russia, Soviet literature, Soviet art, Soviet music, Soviet aspirations are fundamentally and smugly bourgeois. It is the lace curtain behind the iron one. A Soviet official, small or big, is the perfect type of bourgeois mind, of a philistine. The key to Flaubert’s term is the philistinism of his Monsieur Homais. Let me add for double clarity that Marx would have called Flaubert a bourgeois in the politico-economic sense and Flaubert would have called Marx a bourgeois in the spiritual sense; and both would have been right, since Flaubert was a well-to-do gentleman in physical life and Marx was a philistine in his attitude towards the arts.

"Without Flaubert there would have been no Marcel Proust in France, no James Joyce in Ireland. Chekhov in Russia would not have been quite Chekhov. So much for Flaubert’s literary influence."

"Flaubert had a special device which may be called the counterpoint method, or the method of parallel interlinings and interruptions of two or more conversations or trains of thought."

"But in Madame Bovary there is a continual movement within the chapters. I call this device structural transition. We shall inspect certain examples of it."

". . . two associated scenes are written in Flaubert’s favorite contrapuntal structure."

"Another aspect of his style, ... is Flaubert’s fondness for what may be termed the unfolding method, the successive development of visual details, one thing after another thing, with an accumulation of this or that emotion."

"Freud, that medieval quack...."

In his essay on Kafka, he writes:

"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."

"The other matter that I want to dismiss is the Freudian point of view. ... and I reject this nonsense. Kafka himself was extremely critical of Freudian ideas. He considered psychoanalysis (I quote) “a helpless error,” and he regarded Freud’s theories as very approximate, very rough pictures, which did not do justice to details or, what is more, to the essence of the matter. This is another reason why I should like to dismiss the Freudian approach and concentrate, instead, upon the artistic moment. The greatest literary influence upon Kafka was Flaubert’s."

"(But let us not ourselves be insects. Let us first of all study every detail in this story; the general idea will come of itself later when we have all the data we need.) His sister does not understand that Gregor has retained a human heart, human sensitivity, a human sense of decorum, of shame, of humility and pathetic pride.

Here's Vlad riffing on music, the enjoyment of which is for philistines:

Without wishing to antagonize lovers of music, I do wish to point out that taken in a general sense music, as perceived by its consumers, belongs to a more primitive, more animal form in the scale of arts than literature or painting. I am taking music as a whole, not in terms of individual creation, imagination, and composition, all of which of course rival the art of literature and painting, but in terms of the impact music has on the average listener. A great composer, a great writer, a great painter are brothers. But I think that the impact music in a generalized and primitive form has on the listener is of a more lowly quality than the impact of an average book or an average picture. What I especially have in mind is the soothing, lulling, dulling influence of music on some people, such as of the radio or records. In Kafka’s tale it is merely a girl pitifully scraping on a fiddle, and this corresponds in the piece to the canned music or plugged-in music of today. What Kafka felt about music in general is what I have just described: its stupefying, numbing, animal-like quality.

tutti conoscono nabokov per lolita, ma non è tutto qui. era un appassionato entomologo e insegnava letteratura all'università (varie università), per esempio. questo libro raccoglie i suoi appunti per le lezioni su alcuni capolavori della letteratura mondiale: mansfield park, bleak house, madame bovary, the strange case of dr. jekyll and mr. hyde, du coté de chez swann, la metamorfosi, ulysses. alcuni li ho letti, altri no - tutte le lezioni, tranne una, mi hanno catturata ed entusiasmata. joyce non ho mai avuto il coraggio di affrontarlo, tranne the dubliners e con scarso successo, e dopo 10 pagine di lezione non ho avuto il coraggio di affrontare le altre 70. ma il resto, il resto è grandioso. il mio preferito è kafka, con i disegni dello stesso nabokov che descrivono l'insetto gregor e l'appartamento dove vive; e il capitolo che lo riguarda contiene feroci invettive contro freud, definito "the viennese witch doctor". insomma si ride anche, e per chi ha pazienza (non io) c'è l'introduzione di john updike.

Se fossi stata una studentessa di Nabokov mi sarei innamorata dopo due secondi

This was really fun, mostly because I like Nabokov and reading about his thoughts on classic pieces of literature was great. One of the most valuable aspects of this book is that it contains images of his personal notes from his lecture copies.

"...En cierto modo, todos estamos sufriendo una caída mortal desde lo alto de nuestro nacimiento a las losas del cementerio, y nos vamos maravillando con la inmortal Alicia ante los dibujos de la pared.Esta capacidad de asombro ante fruslerías —sin importarnos la inminencia del peligro—, estos apartes del espíritu, estas notas a pie de página del libro de la vida, son las formas más elevadas de la conciencia;y es allí, en este estado mental infantil y especulativo, tan distinto del sentido común y de la lógica, en donde sabemos que el mundo es bueno. ..."

¡Verg%! Para leer, releer, y volver a leer.