“From my point of view,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in Lec­tures on Lit­er­a­ture, “any out­stand­ing work of art is a fan­ta­sy inso­far as it reflects the unique world of a unique indi­vid­ual.” He also says it in the video above, a lec­ture on Franz Kafka’s The Meta­mor­pho­sis orig­i­nal­ly aired by WQED in Pitts­burgh. (Find Kafka’s clas­sic work in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.) But he does­n’t say it him­self; he says it through Christo­pher Plum­mer, who por­trays Nabokov teach­ing in a 1989 re-cre­ation of late-1940s Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty. Lit­er­ar­i­ly inclined stu­dents of the era (includ­ing Unit­ed States Supreme Court Jus­tice Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg) must have expe­ri­enced a sim­i­lar intro­duc­tion to Kaf­ka in Nabokov’s class­es, per­haps down to his sketch of poor Gre­gor Sam­sa’s bee­tle form. But this pro­duc­tion adds the the­atri­cal touch, sure­ly not a fea­ture of Cor­nel­l’s lec­ture halls in those days, of spot­light­ing Plum­mer-as-Nabokov and dark­en­ing every­thing else when­ev­er he reads from the sto­ry.

Plum­mer him­self says a few words about Nabokov at the begin­ning of the video, and he assumes the Russ­ian nov­el­ist’s per­sona at about 1:38. Does Plum­mer nail Nabokov’s dis­tinc­tive­ly multi­na­tion­al accent? Does Nabokov’s obser­va­tion that Gre­gor Sam­sa nev­er uses his wings mean any­thing of impor­tance?

Will we ever enter anoth­er era when pub­lic tele­vi­sion res­ur­rects cul­tur­al lumi­nar­ies to give lec­tures by way of our time’s most respect­ed thes­pi­ans? This half-hour pro­gram gives us many such ques­tions to pon­der, and even if we can’t answer them, those of us who failed to draw inspi­ra­tion from the Robin Williams of Dead Poets Soci­ety will sure­ly find, in Plum­mer’s majes­tic eccen­tric­i­ty, a briefer but more mem­o­rable teacher­ly per­for­mance.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed con­tent:

Nabokov Reads Loli­ta, Names the Great Books of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Nabokov Makes Edi­to­r­i­al Improve­ments to Kafka’s The Meta­mor­pho­sis

Franz Kafka’s It’s a Won­der­ful Life

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

“I think you have to see the face of death in order to start writ­ing seri­ous­ly,” Car­los Fuentes said in his 1981 Paris Review inter­view. “There are peo­ple who see the end quick­ly, like Rim­baud. When you start see­ing it, you feel you have to res­cue these things. Death is the great Mae­ce­nas, Death is the great angel of writ­ing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.”

Fuentes died Tues­day at the age of 83. He wrote seri­ous­ly right up to the end, pub­lish­ing more than 50 books in his life­time, includ­ing Where the Air is Clear, The Death of Artemio Cruz and Ter­ra Nos­tra. He was one of Latin Amer­i­ca’s lead­ing voic­es of the past half cen­tu­ry, and Mex­i­co’s most renowned nov­el­ist. Despite his deep con­nec­tion with his native coun­try, Fuentes lived a sig­nif­i­cant part of his life abroad. As the son of a Mex­i­can diplo­mat he was born in Pana­ma and began his school­ing in Wash­ing­ton D.C.. Lat­er he accept­ed his own diplo­mat­ic and aca­d­e­m­ic post­ings abroad. As he told the Paris Review, the sep­a­ra­tion helped him as a writer:

I am grate­ful for my sense of detach­ment because I can say things about my coun­try oth­er peo­ple don’t say. I offer Mex­i­cans a mir­ror in which they can see how they look, how they talk, how they act, in a coun­try which is a masked coun­try. Of course, I real­ize that my writ­ings are my masks as well, ver­bal masks I offer my coun­try as mir­rors. Mex­i­co is defined in the leg­end of Quet­zal­coatl, the Plumed Ser­pent, the god who cre­ates man and is destroyed by a demon who offers him a mir­ror. The demon shows him he has a face when he thought he had no face. This is the essense of Mex­i­co: to dis­cov­er you have a face when you thought you only had a mask.

To learn more about Fuentes, you can watch the brief video above from AARP Viva, which is in Span­ish with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles, and a 19-minute inter­view below with Char­lie Rose. Both were record­ed last year. In 1981, when the Paris Review inter­view­er asked Fuentes what hooked him and made him want to begin writ­ing, he said: “That won­der­ful thing Ham­let says about ‘a fic­tion, a dream of pas­sion.’ My fic­tion is a dream of pas­sion, born of a cry that says ‘I am incom­plete.’ I want to be com­plete, to be enclosed. I want to add some­thing.”

After return­ing from World War I, Ernest Hem­ing­way moved to Toron­to and began writ­ing for the Toron­to Star. He worked there from 1920 to 1924 and some 70 of his arti­cles have been archived online in an attrac­tive new web­site, the Hem­ing­way Papers. At first Hem­ing­way was a stringer and lat­er he wrote as a staff writer, under the byline Ernest M. Hem­ing­way. His first arti­cle bore the head­line, “Tak­ing a Chance for a Free Shave” and chron­i­cled the young author’s vis­it to a bar­ber col­lege where straight-edge razors were wield­ed for free by stu­dents. He went on to write for the Star about box­ing and trout fish­ing and orga­nized crime in Chica­go. By 1922 Hem­ing­way had moved to Paris with his wife and sent dis­patch­es that antic­i­pat­ed the themes of the nov­els that would make him famous. He wrote about the effects of war, bull­fight­ing and the life of an impov­er­ished artist in Paris. His asso­ci­a­tion with the Star gave him access to post-war Europe that he wouldn’t have had oth­er­wise and work­ing as a reporter taught him how to get up close and per­son­al with his sub­ject mat­ter.

The archive gives vis­i­tors plen­ty to explore, includ­ing com­men­tary about the novelist’s ear­ly assign­ments and embed­ded anno­ta­tions to help put the work in con­text.  Hem­ing­way devel­oped his famous­ly terse, hard-boiled style at the Star and reworked much of his reportage into his fic­tion. Read­ers of his short sto­ries and nov­els will see seeds of Hemingway’s fic­tion in arti­cles like “Tan­cre­do is Dead,” about the death of a man whose job was to tease the bull by stand­ing as still as a stat­ue in the ring:

“No. He was nei­ther an opera singer nor a five-cent cig­ar. He was once known as the bravest man in the world. And he died in a dingy, sor­did room in Madrid, the city where he had enjoyed his great­est tri­umphs.”

Read­ing through Hem­ing­way’s jour­nal­ism is to wit­ness a fic­tion writer in the mak­ing.

Kate Rix writes about k‑12 instruc­tion and high­er ed. 

Ear­li­er this week we brought you rare record­ings of Sig­mund Freud and Jorge Luis Borges speak­ing in Eng­lish. Today we present a remark­able series of record­ings of the great Russ­ian nov­el­ist Leo Tol­stoy read­ing a pas­sage from his book, Wise Thoughts for Every Day, in four lan­guages: Eng­lish, Ger­man, French and Russ­ian.

Wise Thoughts For Every Day (find a copy in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks) was Tol­stoy’s last major work. It first appeared in 1903 as The Thoughts of Wise Men, and was revised and renamed sev­er­al times before the author’s death in 1910. It was banned by the Sovi­et regime, only to reap­pear in 1995 as a best­seller in Rus­sia. In 1997 it was trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish by Peter Sekirin and pub­lished as A Cal­en­dar of Wis­dom. The book is a col­lec­tion of pas­sages from a diverse group of thinkers, rang­ing from Lao-Tzu to Ralph Wal­do Emer­son. “I felt that I have been ele­vat­ed to great spir­i­tu­al and moral heights by com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the best and wis­est peo­ple whose books I read and whose thoughts I select­ed for my Cir­cle of Read­ing,” wrote Tol­stoy in his diary.

As an old man (watch video of him short­ly before he died) Tol­stoy reject­ed his great works of fic­tion, believ­ing that it was more impor­tant to give moral and spir­i­tu­al guid­ance to the com­mon peo­ple. “To cre­ate a book for the mass­es, for mil­lions of peo­ple,” wrote Tol­stoy, “is incom­pa­ra­bly more impor­tant and fruit­ful than to com­pose a nov­el of the kind which diverts some mem­bers of the wealthy class­es for a short time, and then is for­ev­er for­got­ten.”

Tol­stoy arranged his book for the mass­es as a cal­en­dar, with a series of read­ings for each day of the year. For exam­ple under today’s date, May 9, Tol­stoy selects brief pas­sages from Immanuel Kant, Solon, and the Koran. Under­neath he writes, “We can­not stop on the way to self-per­fec­tion. As soon as you notice that you have a big­ger inter­est in the out­er world than in your­self, then you should know that the world moves behind you.”

The audio record­ings above were made at the writer’s home in Yas­naya Polyana on Octo­ber 31, 1909, when he was 81 years old. He died just over a year lat­er. Tol­stoy appar­ent­ly trans­lat­ed the pas­sage him­self. The Eng­lish ver­sion sounds a bit like the King James Bible. The words are hard to make out in the record­ing, but he says:

That the object of life is self-per­fec­tion, the per­fec­tion of all immor­tal souls, that this is the only object of my life, is seen to be cor­rect by the fact alone that every oth­er object is essen­tial­ly a new object. There­fore, the ques­tion whether thou hast done what thou shoudst have done is of immense impor­tance, for the only mean­ing of thy life is in doing in this short term allowed thee, that which is desired of thee by He or That which has sent thee into life. Art thou doing the right thing?

Tol­stoy is known to have made sev­er­al voice record­ings in his life, dat­ing back to 1895 when he made two wax cylin­der record­ings for Julius Block. Russ­ian lit­er­ary schol­ar Andrew D. Kauf­man has col­lect­ed three more vin­tage record­ings (all in Russ­ian) includ­ing Tol­stoy’s les­son to peas­ant chil­dren on his estate, a read­ing of his fairy tale “The Wolf,” and an excerpt from his essay “I Can­not be Silent.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Last Days of Leo Tol­stoy Cap­tured on Video

Leo Tol­stoy Cre­ates a List of the 50+ Books That Influ­enced Him Most (1891)

The Com­plete Works of Leo Tol­stoy Online: New Archive Will Present 90 Vol­umes for Free (in Russ­ian)

Leo Tolstoy’s Fam­i­ly Recipe for Mac­a­roni and Cheese

700 Free Audio Books and 700 Free eBooks  (lists include works by Tol­stoy and oth­er Russ­ian Clas­sics)