Lectures on Foreign Literature

In the «Lectures on Foreign Literature», first published in 1980, the greatest Russian-American writer of the 20th century, Vladimir Nabokov, presented himself to his admirers, who primarily knew him as a virtuoso wordsmith, in other, sometimes unexpected facets: a thoughtful reader, a perceptive, meticulous, and at the same time, very biased researcher, a temperamental and demanding educator. The book is based on a lecture course «Masters of European Prose», prepared for students at Cornell University, where the writer taught in the 1940s and 1950s. On the pages of this volume, Nabokov-the-lecturer gives his audience an excellent lesson in «close reading» of the works of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Robert Louis Stevenson, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce.