Lectures on Russian Literature: Chekhov, Dostoevski, Gogol, Gorky, Tolstoy, Turgenev - Hardcover

Vladimir Nabokov

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297778862 ISBN 13: 9780297778868

Publisher: Littlehampton Book Services Ltd, 1982

Synopsis

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Littlehampton Book Services Ltd
• Publication date: 1982
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0297778862
• ISBN 13: 9780297778868
• Binding: Hardcover