Lectures on Literature

23 hrs. 24 min.

Popular Science

Language Russian

Author Vladimir Nabokov

Narrator Alexander Lutoshkin

Description

In “Lectures on Foreign Literature,” first published in 1980, the greatest Russian-American writer of the twentieth century, Vladimir Nabokov, appears before the reading public that knew him mainly as a brilliant novelist—in other, sometimes unexpected, roles. The lecture course “Masters of European Prose,” prepared for students at Cornell University, where the writer taught in the 1940s and 1950s, and which formed the basis of the book, reveals in Nabokov a thoughtful reader, a perceptive, meticulous—and yet highly biased—researcher; a temperamental and demanding teacher—while also confirming his reputation as a virtuoso artist of words. On the pages of this volume, Nabokov the lecturer gives his audience an excellent lesson in “close reading,” distinguished by exceptional attention to artistic details and enriched with unexpected, sometimes paradoxical observations about the narrative worlds of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Robert Louis Stevenson, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce.

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