The great novelist Vladimir Nabokov, whose novels include Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire, was also a literature professor and an ardent lepidopterist. In perhaps his most famous lecture, on Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” delivered while teaching at Cornell University, he states:
“Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.”
In the lecture, Nabokov also speculates as to precisely what kind of insect Gregor Samsa has become. A cockroach? (You can read the published version of the lecture here, and here you can view a thirty-minute film version created for public television. The late Christopher Plummer portrays Nabokov.
Here, for good measure, is the first page of Nabokov’s annotated copy of Kafka’s story (click on the image to see a larger copy):
