Nabokov on Joyce, Kafka

[Ya Sam]

and on "mediocrities". I haven't read this interview before, and I should 
say professor Nabokov can be harsh. I disagree on Mann and Faulkner (haven't 
read Pasternak).

"What  is  your  approach to the teaching of literature?


     I can give you some examples. When studying Kafka's famous
story, my students had to know  exactly  what  kind  of  insect
Gregor  turned  into  (it  was  a  domed  beetle,  not the flat
cockroach of sloppy translators) and they had  to  be  able  to
describe  exactly  the  arrangement  of  the  rooms,  with  the
position of doors and furniture, in the Sarnsa  family's  flat.
They  had  to  know  the  map  of  Dublin for Ulysses. I
believe in stressing the specific detail; the general ideas can
take care of themselves. Ulysses, of course, is a divine
work of art and will live on despite the  academic  nonentities
who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths. I once
gave  a  student  a  C-minus,  or  perhaps  a  D-plus, just for
applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from  Homer  while
not  even  noticing  the  comings  and goings of the man in the
brown mackintosh. He didn't even know who the man in the  brown
mackintosh  was. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all
means, but my English is patball to Joyce's champion game." ...

"Ever   since   the   days   when  such  formidable
mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, a  person  called  Tagore,
another called Maxim Gorky, a third called Romain Rolland, used
to be accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by
fabricated  notions  about  so-called  "great books". That, for
instance, Mann's asinine Death in Venice or  Pasternak's
melodramatic  and  vilely  written Zhivago or Faulkner's
corncobby chronicles can be considered  "masterpieces,"  or  at
least  what  journalists call "great books," is to me an absurd
delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to  a  chair.
My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are,
in     this     order:    Joyce's    Ulysses,    Kafka's
Transformation, Biely's Petersburg, and the first
half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time."

http://www.lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter05.txt

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