Where are the great one's gone?

As a graduate student I had briefly encountered several luminaries and had taken their classes.

Here is a list of the luminaries I could scratch up from my memory:

1. Denis Donoghue

2. E.L. Doctorow

3. Harold Bloom

4. [....] 

None of them, I suppose match the star power of Vladimir Nabokov who taught at Cornell in the 50s and 60s. 

Anyhow, personally I don't remember anything outstanding happening with any of these Professors while I took their class. Stuff happened to some of my fellow grad students. A friend of mine, for instance, was told by luminary #1 that it's best for her were she to either revert back to high school English or take a long absence from the vanity fair that is life, lock herself up in a dark room, take a vow of silence and contemplate on whatever it is that brought her to believe, even fleetingly, that she was good enough to take on the study of humanities at a high level like this.

Luminary #2 would doze off, I recall, in the middle of his lectures while #3 eagerly rattled on about his close reading of Shakespeare and his inordinate fondness for Sir Falstaff. He was, in fact, Falstaff reincarnated.

There was one luminary whose class I didn't take, but who had the reputation of snatching books from the hands of students and throwing them into the corners of classrooms.

Compared to the aforementioned folks Nabokov should have drilled holes into the walls of his classroom, or done something like that--something moody and out of this world.

But as narrated by Jay Epstein, who remembers taking a course on the novel taught by the author of Lolita, Nabokov merely tried to teach well.

Nabokov would throw a long reading list in which Tolstoy's Anna Karenina would feature prominently. He would, Epstein recalls, ask students not to worry about the historical background and other context-related details accompanying the novels. A novel, Nabokov would say, "is a work of pure invention."

Once Professor Nabokov gave his class a pop quiz in which he asked students to describe from memory the details of the train station where Anna gets off to meet Vronsky. Epstein says he hadn't read the novel, so preoccupied he was with absorbing the sights and sounds of Ithaca's arcadian setting. His mind veered in the direction of a scene of the meeting in a movie version of Tolstoy's classic. Anna was played by Vivien Leigh (male memories are known to give preferential treatment to Leigh), and epstein expertly churned out the details.

The details did not match the details from the original (Tolstoy's novel), yet Nabokov gave Epstein the numerical equivalent of an "A." The legendary novelist hadn't seen or heard of the movie, but he believed that a good novelist generates pictures in the minds of his readers, and these pictures could very well be created by the reader himself.

What Epstein produced was then a picture of the picture, which meant, in the books of Nabokov, that Tolstoy was truly a great novelist and Epstein, the student, was an excellent reader.

Two thumbs up to Nabokov; a mark of the truly great is to have a little less ego...