It is difficult to refrain from the relief of irony, from the luxury of contempt, when surveying the mess that meek hands, obedient tentacles guided by the bloated octopus of the state, have managed to make out of that fiery, fanciful free thing—literature. Even more: I have learned to treasure […]

By Fredson Bowers The fact cannot and need not be disguised that the texts for these essays represent Vladimir Nabokov’s written-out notes for delivery as classroom lectures and that they cannot be regarded as a finished literary product such as he produced when he revised his classroom lectures on Gogol […]

By Vladimir Nabokov Russian Literature” as a notion, an immediate idea, this notion in the minds of non-Russians is generally limited to the awareness of Russia’s having produced half a dozen great masters of prose between the middle of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. This […]

By Vladimir Nabokov A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said “full-grown person” because the child or the adolescent who may […]

By Vladimir Nabokov Three grades of evil can be discerned in the queer world of verbal transmigration. The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge. This is mere human frailty and thus excusable. The next step to Hell is taken by the translator who […]

By Vladimir Nabokov I have led you through the wonderland of one century of literature. That this literature is Russian literature cannot much matter to you since you cannot read Russian—and in the art of literature (I understand it as an art) language is the only reality that divides this […]

The grandfather was a tyrannical brute; his two sons — Gorki’s uncles—though terrified of their father, in turn terrorized and maltreated their wives and children. The atmosphere was that of never-ending abuse, senseless reproaches, brutal floggings, money-grabbing, and dreary supplications to God. “Between the barracks and the gaol,” says Gorki’s […]

By Vladimir Nabokov Let us select and examine a typical Gorki short story, for instance the one called “On the Rafts.”* Consider the author’s method of exposition. A certain Mitya and a certain Sergey are steering the raft across the wide and misty Volga. The owner of the raft, who […]

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov’s grandfather had been a serf but for 3,500 rubles had bought his own and his family’s freedom. His father was a petty merchant who lost his money in the 1870s, whereupon the whole family went to live in Moscow while Anton Pavlovich remained behind in Taganrog (Southeast […]

By Vladimir Nabokov Chekhov comes into the story “The Lady with the Little Dog” without knocking. There is no dilly-dallying. The very first paragraph reveals the main character, the young fairhaired lady followed by her white Spitz dog on the waterfront of a Crimean resort, Yalta, on the Black Sea. […]