Editor's Foreword by Fredson Bowers

Literature 311-312, Masters of European Fiction
This course included Anna Karenin, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,”Dead Souls, “The Greatcoat,” Fathers and Sons, Madame Bovary, Mansfield Park, Bleak House, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,”Swann’s Way, “The Metamorphosis,”and Ulysses.
Nabokov tried to reveal how masterpieces work:
“In my academic days I endeavored to such combinations of details as yield the sensual spark without which a book is dead. In that respect, general ideas are of no importance. Any ass can assimilate the main points of Tolstoy’s attitude toward adultery but in order to enjoy Tolstoy’s art the good reader must wish to visualize, for instance, the arrangement of railway carriage on the Moscow-Petersburg night train as it was a hundred years ago. Here diagrams are most helpful.Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’sintertwining itinerariesclearly traced. Without a visual perception of the larch labyrinth in Mansfield Parkthat novel loses some of its stereographic charm, and unless the facade of Dr. Jekyll’s house is distinctly reconstructed in the student’s mind, the enjoyment of Stevensons’s story cannot be perfect .”
At the next class he approvingly reported that one student had answered, “Because I like stories.”
Quotation bulked large in Nabokov’s teaching methods as an aid in his effort to transmit his ideas of literary artistry.
Nabokov’s students were expected to follows lectures with their books open before them. Hence they could be referred to points in the text by allusions in a manner impossible for a reader to follow, who must be supplied with extra quotation as a substitute.
… “A nosegay of the senses in the present and the vision of an event or sensation in the past, this is why sense and memory come together and lost time is found again”.