Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature  at Cornell University in the 1950s always made a deep impression on me. A moment which I remember with particular fondness in those lectures is his minutely detailed and elegantly expressed description for the benefit of his American students of what it was like to travel in the nineteenth century Russian railroad car. His aim was to enlighten them on Anna Karenina.  Was Nabokov conducting a class in literature, or language or Russian studies? He would probably have despised the distinction. Ditto. Using literature primarily as a means of learning American English or learning “about” America is a little bit like burning antiques for firewood. Literature is first and foremost its own universe, a fragment of life observed with a magnifying glass, and any direct reading of a novel should first enable students to plunge into this universe, to experience it from the inside, to deal directly with the work itself. If one can say that literature has a purpose, it is ultimately to delve into the mysteries of existence, to open our eyes to who and what we are in every sphere of life from the most mundane to the most exalted. And this role should always retain pride of place in the teaching of literature. This does not, however, mean that one cannot improve one’s English or understand more about America by reading American novels and stories and plays. It only means that both aims are best achieved when they are conceived within the boarder context of the work of literature itself.

I have noticed that Russian students in English language programs, when reading American novels, often know the dictionary definition of each word of the text, but have no real general comprehension of what they have read. They are accustomed of being given vocabulary lists which they memorise as proof of their language skills, but when asked questions such as “What is going on?” in a paragraph, page or chapter, their faces go blank with bewilderment. At such moments, it is usually best to skip over the retention of vocabulary, except in those cases when a word or phrase provides clues to the essence of scene or character and is necessary for its illumination (those are the words or phrases which their interest in the deeper life of the work will make them remember in any case), and focus on helping them to get a feeling for the text, its flow and overall meaning. My Russian mother learned to read when her French governess would stop reading a story to her at its most interesting moment, and my mother couldn’t bear to wait until the next meeting to find out what happened next. This desire to be drawn into the world of “what happens next” (in its literal, psychological, philosophical, social and historical sense) is what must first of all drive of student’s comprehension. Little by little then, the world of the novel starts to fall into place, the words find a home for themselves and the understanding of America grows as a limb grows on a tree, not because it is artificially attached to the tree, but because the tree itself has been properly  nourished and the result is part of an organic process.

Given these caveats, let me go on to say that a great deal about the American experience can be vicariously known through the reading of American literature when placed in its proper context, and that it is possible to select works for students to read which makes that experience come alive in the way that landing in America for the first time makes America come alive. In that case, one learns the language by osmosis, because the situation demands it. In reading, something similar happens, but only if the work itself is interesting enough to sustain their engagement. This is best accomplished by using literature which appeals to recognisable human emotions, and in particular to Russian students, writings in which the workings of the human soul play a certain role.

This means choosing works which resonate for them, which create the “shock for recognition” which is literature’s aim. For example, Catcher in the Rye, probably the most popular American novel in Russia, wonderfully captures the enduring spirit of adolescent romanticism, idealism and skepticism. Its ear for the “phony” moments of life rings true for almost all readers. Students can learn a great deal of American slang from 1950'’ and about the atmosphere of an American private boarding school, as well as about New York’s Central Park and its duck population, and the character of the Fifth Avenue apartment houses. They can certainly learn a great deal more about the experience of checking into a slightly seedy hotel than they could from lists of works and phrases such as  “when is check out time?” “Shall I pay in advance?” “Do you need a bellboy?” (even though such phrases are of obvious practical utility). But what they learn first of all is to love Holden Caulfield, to experience the world through his eyes because he is just like us, or just as we would want to be, or just as we are afraid of being. And that is a good thing. That is as it should be.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is another novel much loved by Russians, which is suitable even for high-school students because the language is at once richly lyrical and relatively simple, and because the story is so compellingly romantic. It engages the mind as well as the soul on multiple levels. It makes you fall in love with words. But in order to understand Gatsby, one has to understand something about the mentality of America in the twenties and something about Prohibition and even something about what “fixing the World Series” means. Gatsby is a product of a particular moment in American history, but at the same time, he is eternal. And Daisy with her voice which “sounds like money” is also eternal. The novel tells us everything you need to know about the American relationship to success and failure, but it makes us feel the weight of that relationship because, as readers, we care so much about consequences for characters who draw us so deeply into the orbit of their lives.

In Country, a novel written in the 1980’s and published in Russian in “Inostrannaya Literatura” is available in a Russian translation partly funded by the U.S. government. (A surprising choice for a government sponsored translation!) It captures in a uniquely contemporary way the anguish of a seventeen year old girl whose father was killed in Vietnam and whose uncle, with whom she lives in a state of casual disorder, is a lifetime casualty of his wartime experience. The story concerns her obsession with the past, her passion for figuring out the truth about that past. It is an exploration of the nature of memory and how it transforms as well as disfigures life. The language of the book is often low and vulgar (it is real, ordinary American speech) but the book itself is anything but vulgar because it expresses so deeply the longing for truth and the consequences of its suppression. Many students who are “not interested in Vietnam” and would be bored listening to a lecture on the war and its consequences for America, are nonetheless drawn into the book because it is not only “about Vietnam”, but about alienation, mistrust of government, tenderness and the love of truth as well as about that truly American subject of “identity”, finding it, losing it, figuring out what it is.

“Identity”, but a very different form of identity, is at the heart of Color Purple by Alice Walker which also has an adolescent as its central character, but in this case, an adolescent whose life has been utterly warped by her early experiences. Its main theme is the experience of coming to consciousness. The girl is black, and the book consists of her letters to God, addressed to in this way because she is so isolated, so cut off from humanity, that she thinks only God could possibly hear her and care about her. Again, students who would normally turn their heads away from a lecture on “Blacks in America” come to the realisation of what life is like or was like for a black woman almost by accident, by becoming a part of the anguished evolution of her experience and mind, which is expressed without a trace of preachiness, but just simply “telling it like it is.”

These are only notes, brief forays, arrows pointing towards the unicorn hidden somewhere in the canvas/ For now, the search itself is enough, and in any case, the unicorn remains alive.