The Figure of the Teacher in Nabokov's Writing (1941–1959)

This thesis analyses the relationship between Vladimir Nabokov’s art and his teaching, how he models teaching in his fiction and how this relates to his work in US higher education between 1941 and 1959.

Where recent criticism analyses Vladimir’s teaching through his posthumously edited and published lectures, I reinstate the scrappy authority of his and Véra’s lecture notes, and consider their pedagogical work through the lens of his prose texts and a range of archival materials particular to their time in the classroom. Through a literary engagement with Nabokov’s teaching—with the pedagogical arguments that he made in essays such as “The Creative Writer” and “The Place of Russian Studies in the Curriculum,” and the scenes of teaching littered in his fiction from "Lolita" to "Pnin" and “The Vane Sisters”—this thesis reorients the coordinates for Nabokov’s teaching by illuminating the fissures in his work as a university teacher.

I broadly understand these fissures as his fraught engagements with academic and administrative colleagues, the overlap between sexual abuse in his fiction and a key concept in his lecture material, and the intensity of his interactions with students. I examine these through the lens of three figures: the outsider, the Master Enchanter, and the perverse tutor. These figures serve as critical shorthand for fleshing out important intellectual, institutional, and biographical contexts for his work. Rather than reproducing analyses that overlook or neglect these sources of “sticky data,” I demonstrate how critically generative it is to bring these sources into dialogue with each other.

At its core, then, this thesis asks: what does making an argument about Nabokov’s writing necessitate?