Since his death in 1977, Nabokov has made three literary appearances: rather plodding affairs for such a gifted ghost, even allowing for their modest academic occasions and for the fact that the published texts (Lectures on Literature, Lectures on Russian Literature, Lectures on Don Quixote) represent scripts and drafts rather than the things themselves. Nabokov's lectures, like his cramped and prickly prefaces, mainly serve to highlight the marvels of his fiction, where the pedestrian takes to the air, and his often domineering intelligence joins forces with his kindlier imagination. At first glance the present volume - containing four early and previously untranslated Russian plays and a couple of lectures on drama given at Stanford in 1941 - looks like just another dip into the dwindling family barrel. Dmitri Nabokov speaks in his introduction of 'the elegant, appetising, carefully selected baggage that survives Father in Montreux', and for a flickering instant I thought perhaps he was planning to publish that. The first glance, though, gets only part of the picture.

LRB 4 April 1985 | PDF Download