Volume 28, Number 19 · December 3, 1981
The Novelist as Pedagogue
By John Bayley
Lectures on Russian Literature
by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Fredson Bowers
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 416 pp., $19.95
People will sometimes say: 'I was lucky at such and such an age. I had a teacher of genius.' And it turns out that what this genius could do was—in a coup de foudre—to open the eyes of the young person to the transcendental realities of literature. There was such an eccentrically lovable pedant—a Mr. Chips or a Mr. Pnin—in Professor Nabokov. In his teaching he was a genius of a distinctly old-fashioned sort.
Review, 4113 words
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