Masters of European Prose

In the early 1980s, thanks to the work of Vladimir Nabokov’s heirs and the American textual scholar F. Bowers, readers were able to see yet another side of the genius of the author of “Lolita” and “Ada.” Nabokov’s university lectures on Russian and European literature, delivered at Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard in the 1940s–1950s and compiled into three volumes, not only opened up for Western audiences the vivid world of Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, but also shed fresh light on Dickens, Flaubert, Proust, Kafka, and Joyce—unexpectedly enriching the view of Nabokov himself as a writer.

Becoming acquainted with these lectures—where biographical sketches are combined with close analysis and original interpretations of classic texts—turns into the key to understanding Nabokov’s creative thinking and the very nature of literary art. In this edition, for the first time, a complete translation of his lectures on the masters of European prose is published, supplemented with accompanying and facsimile materials. In addition to F. Bowers’s notes, the book includes the editor’s commentary.