num_pages: 352
description: This volume complements the widely praised 
  Lectures on Literature
, which the Washington Post Book world ranked "with Flaubert's letters, James's 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 Russia, 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.
language: English
title: Lectures on Russian Literature
titlecomplete: Lectures on Russian Literature
genres: Writing, Books About Books, Nonfiction, Literature, Essays, Classics, Russian Literature, Criticism, Russia, Literary Criticism
ratings_count: 1876
publisher: Harcourt