Lectures on Russian Literature - Vladimir Nabokov (Fredson Bowers Ed)

This volume complements the widely praised Lectures on Literature, which the Washington Post Book World ranked with "with Flaubert's letters, James' prefaces and Woolf's diaries as privileged, nourishing, irreplaceable meditations on the art of fiction."

If Nabokov sparkled in those lectures on European authors, here in his commentaries on the great 19th-century Russian writers - Gogol, Turgenev, Gorki, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Chekhov - he is completely in his element. "Not only did these writers represent to him the absolute height of Russian literature (with Pushkin, of course)," Fredson Bowers notes, "but they also flourished counter to the utilitarianism that he despised both in the social critics of the time and, more bitingly, in its later Soviet development." They were the last unfettered voices of his lost homeland.

As Nabokov guides readers through intricacies of plot and character, meticulously supplemented with facts about 19th-century Russian, he again demonstrates his brilliance as a teacher and his ability to enchant. Thirty-eight illustrations give evidence of the care with which he prepared these celebrated lectures.

ISBN: 0297778862

Pages: 324

Hardcover with dustjacket

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982

Good condition; DJ shows some signs of wear

B54