Volume 30, Number 3 · March 3, 1983
The Supreme Fairy Tale
By V.S. Pritchett
Lectures on Don Quixote
by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Fredson Bowers, preface by Reynolds Price, introduction by Guy Davenport
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 240 pp., $17.95
When a novelist takes to a bout of lecturing to university students he knows that for him it is sin to live by his mouth. He is throwing away his syntax and his prose; the charms of the impromptu will not work unless he has first gone through the drudgery of preparation. Without his habit of thorough preparation, his dash, his delight in mischief, prejudice, and the cheerfully perverse, Vladimir Nabokov's lectures would have been no more than pepper and salt. He was an extraordinary preparer. When he came to deliver his course on Don Quixote at Harvard in 1951-1952 he had, for example, gone to the length of writing a summary of the events in this enormous novel, chapter by chapter, so making an invaluable crib. He wrote and rewrote his script, and at once destroyed its virginal look by covering it with corrections, possible asides, alternative paragraphs and optional quotations. He arrived at the lectern with a mass of possibilities.
Review, 1812 words
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