By Vladimir Nabokov The action of “In the Gully” (usually translated as “In the Ravine”) takes place half-a-century ago—the story was written in 1900. The place, somewhere in Russia, is a village called Ukleyevo : kley sounds like clay and means “glue.” The only thing to tell about the village […]

By Vladimir Nabokov In 1896 The Seagull (Chaika) was a complete failure at the Alexandrine Theatre in St. Petersburg, but at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898 it was a tremendous success. The first exposition—talk between two minor characters, the girl Masha and the village teacher Medvedenko—is thoroughly permeated by […]

Belinski from “Letter to Gogol” (1847): “… you have not observed that Russia sees its salvation not in mysticism, not in asceticism, not in pietism, but in the successes of civilization, of enlightenment, of humanitarianism. It is not preachments that Russia needs (she has heard them), nor prayers (she has […]

By Vladimir Nabokov Because he can spin a yarn with such suspense, such innuendoes, Dostoevski used to be eagerly read by schoolboys and schoolgirls in Russia, together with Fenimore Cooper, Victor Hugo, Dickens, and Turgenev. I must have been twelve when forty-five years ago I read Crime and Punishment for […]

By Vladimir Nabokov The story whose title should be “Memoirs from Under the Floor,” or “Memoirs from a Mousehole” bears in translation the stupidly incorrect title of Notes from the Underground. The story may be deemed by some a case history, a streak of persecution mania, with variations. My interest […]

By Vladimir Nabokov In The Idiot we have the Dostoevskian positive type. He is Prince Myshkin, endowed with the kindness and the capacity to forgive possessed before him by Christ alone. Myshkin is sensitive to a weird degree: he feels everything that is going on inside other people, even when […]

By Vladimir Nabokov The Possessed is the story of Russian terrorists, plotting violence and destruction, and actually murdering one of their own number. It was denounced as a reactionary novel by the radical critics. On the other hand, it has been described as a penetrating study of people who have […]

By Vladimir Nabokov The Brothers Karamazov is the most perfect example of the detective story technique as constantly used by Dostoevski in his other novels. It is a long novel (more than 1,000 pages), and it is a curious novel. The things that are curious about it are numerous; even […]

LEO TOLSTOY (1828-1910) Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. Leaving aside his precursors Pushkin and Lermontov, we might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy; second, Gogol; third, Chekhov; fourth, Turgenev.† This is rather like grading students’ papers and no doubt Dostoevski and Saltykov […]

By Vladimir Nabokov All was confusion in the Oblonski household, but all is order in Tolstoy’s kingdom. A vivid array of people, the main characters of the novel, already start to exist for the reader in part one. Anna’s curiously dual nature is already perceptible in the double role she […]