Delage-Toriel, Lara. ‘Do Dogs Eat Poppies?’: When Nabokov teaches Flaubert . 2018

In this contribution, I discuss the lecture on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, a novel that Nabokov remained fascinated by ever since he first read it as a youth. Nabokov’s discussion of Flaubert’s novel, and of the aesthetic premises that underlie its production, is clearly founded on the lecturer’s great sympathy with the French author’s poetics. Like Nabokov, Flaubert has a great eye for the significant detail and is adamant in his choice of ‘le mot juste’ – a shared principle that accounts for Nabokov’s exacting criticism of the English translations that he used in class. However, as I hope to show, Nabokov’s ‘critical’ approach, overly paraphrastic, prescriptive and judgmental in style, is especially valuable as a testimony of his own cultural background and ethos, one which informs a markedly binary vision of social roles – male versus female, teacher versus student, writer versus reader.