Here’s a little known fact, of which Mary Karr recently reminded us: as an undergraduate, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died this weekend at the age of 87, was once one of Vladimir Nabokov’s students: she took his legendary class on European Literature at Cornell in the early 50s. Without having seen a roster, I daresay she is the most influential, and most important, person he ever taught. But he was important to her, as well—and to her writing, which has demonstrably changed the world.
“At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write,” she wrote in a 2016 Times op-ed. “Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.”
In an earlier interview, part of a series in which “eight Supreme Court justices described how they write their opinions, what they look for in briefs and the art of legal writing generally” (FYI, Justice Kennedy thinks a good brief is like Hemingway, Justice Thomas thinks it’s like 24), she called Nabokov “an enormous influence” on her writing. “To this day,” she remembered, “I can hear some of the things Nabokov said. Bleak House was one of the books we read in his course. He read aloud the opening pages at our first lecture on the book—describing the location of the chancery court surrounded by persuasive fog. Those pages paint a picture in words.”
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