Lectures on Russian Literature (Lektsii po Russkoy Literature)

In his Lectures on Russian Literature, first published in 1981, Vladimir Nabokov, the greatest Russian-American writer of the 20th century, revealed to a reading public known primarily as a brilliant novelist, other, sometimes unexpected, facets of his personality. His lecture courses, 'Masters of European Prose' and 'Russian Literature in Translation,' prepared for students at Wellesley College and Cornell University, where the writer taught in the 1940s and 1950s, revealed Nabokov as a thoughtful reader, an insightful, meticulous, yet highly passionate researcher, and a temperamental and demanding teacher—all while confirming his reputation as a virtuoso writer. In the pages of this volume, Nabokov the lecturer offers his audience a superb lesson in 'close reading' of the works of Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky—a reading method exhaustively described by the author himself: 'Literature, real literature, should not be swallowed in one gulp, like a medicine good for the heart or the mind, that 'stomach' of the soul. Literature must be taken in small doses, broken up, crushed, ground—then you will feel its sweet fragrance in the depths of your palms; you must crunch it, rolling it with pleasure in your tongue—then, and only then, will you appreciate its rare aroma, and the fragmented, crushed particles will reunite in your consciousness and acquire the beauty of the whole, to which you have mixed a little of your own blood.'