Vladimir Nabokov - Littératures

by Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Guy Davenport

Littératures réunit l'ensemble des conférences données par Vladimir Nabokov entre 1941 et 1958 dans plusieurs universités américaines où il enseignait la littérature européenne. On y trouve, outre deux essais, " Bons lecteurs et bons écrivains " et " L'art de la littérature et du bon sens ", des réflexions et analyses originales et percutantes consacrées aux oeuvres de Jane Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, Stevenson, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, ainsi qu'à celles de ses compatriotes russes Gogol, Tourgueniev, Dostoïevski, Tolstoï, Tchekhov et Gorki. Ce volume propose enfin une longue étude, tout aussi iconoclaste, du Don Quichotte de Cervantès.
Balayant la plupart des idées admises concernant ces chefs-d'oeuvre, Nabokov affirme avec superbe, humour et ironie sa propre conception de la littérature : rejet des approches historique, sociologique ou psychologique (Freud, le " charlatan viennois ", est constamment la cible de ses sarcasmes), suprématie de la structure, du style, du détail et de l'agencement des détails entre eux. " Caressez les détails, les divins détails ", tonitrue-t-il de sa chaire. Et encore : " La littérature est invention. La fiction est fiction. Appeler une histoire "histoire vraie', c'est faire injure à la fois à l'art et à la vérité. Tout grand écrivain est un grand illusionniste. "
Préfacière de la présente édition, Cécile Guilbert écrit : " Ce que Nabokov dispense a priori avec largesse à ses étudiants ? Pas moins que la crème de la littérature, les moyens critiques de la reconnaître et d'en jouir. Un don au sens du "talent' comme de l'"offrande', généreux et forcément aristocratique. "

1211 pages, Paperback

First published February 18, 2010

About the author

Vladimir Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Набоков) was a writer defined by a life of forced movement and extraordinary linguistic transformation. Born into a wealthy, liberal aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia, he grew up trilingual, speaking Russian, English, and French in a household that nurtured his intellectual curiosities, including a lifelong passion for butterflies. This seemingly idyllic, privileged existence was abruptly shattered by the Bolshevik Revolution, which forced the family into permanent exile in 1919. This early, profound experience of displacement and the loss of a homeland became a central, enduring theme in his subsequent work, fueling his exploration of memory, nostalgia, and the irretrievable past.
The first phase of his literary life began in Europe, primarily in Berlin, where he established himself as a leading voice among the Russian émigré community under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin". During this prolific period, he penned nine novels in his native tongue, showcasing a precocious talent for intricate plotting and character study. Works like The Defense explored obsession through the extended metaphor of chess, while Invitation to a Beheading served as a potent, surreal critique of totalitarian absurdity. In 1925, he married Véra Slonim, an intellectual force in her own right, who would become his indispensable partner, editor, translator, and lifelong anchor.
The escalating shadow of Nazism necessitated another, urgent relocation in 1940, this time to the United States. It was here that Nabokov undertook an extraordinary linguistic metamorphosis, making the challenging yet resolute shift from Russian to English as his primary language of expression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945, solidifying his new life in North America. To support his family, he took on academic positions, first founding the Russian department at Wellesley College, and later serving as a highly regarded professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959.
During this academic tenure, he also dedicated significant time to his other great passion: lepidoptery. He worked as an unpaid curator of butterflies at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His scientific work was far from amateurish; he developed novel taxonomic methods and a groundbreaking, highly debated theory on the migration patterns and phylogeny of the Polyommatus blue butterflies, a hypothesis that modern DNA analysis confirmed decades later.
Nabokov achieved widespread international fame and financial independence with the publication of Lolita in 1955, a novel that was initially met with controversy and censorship battles due to its provocative subject matter concerning a middle-aged literature professor and his obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The novel's critical and commercial success finally allowed him to leave teaching and academia behind. In 1959, he and Véra moved permanently to the quiet luxury of the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he focused solely on writing, translating his earlier Russian works into meticulous English, and studying local butterflies.
His later English novels, such as Pale Fire (1962), a complex, postmodern narrative structured around a 999-line poem and its delusional commentator, cemented his reputation as a master stylist and a technical genius. His literary style is characterized by intricate wordplay, a profound use of allusion, structural complexity, and an insistence on the artist's total, almost tyrannical, control over their created world. Nabokov often expressed disdain for what he termed "topical trash" and the simplistic interpretations of Freudian psychoanalysis, preferring instead to focus on the power of individual consciousness, the mechanics of memory, and the intricate, often deceptive, interplay between art and perceived "reality". His unique body of work, straddling multiple cultures and languages, continues to