Nabokov, Vladimir - Lectures on Literature (1983)

Nabokov, Vladimir - Lectures on Literature

Introduction by John Updike

Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers

London, Picador, 1983

Paperback
13 x 19,7 x 2,8 cm.
385 Pages

GOOD
Two very little and pretty little holes in the front cover and the first page

For two decades, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, Nabokov introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses.

In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov’s teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction.

This volume collects Nabokov’s famous lectures on Western European literature, with analysis and commentary on Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Marcel Proust’s The Walk by Swann’s Place, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other works.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899 - 1977) was a Russian writer from Saint Petersburg. His best-known and, according to many, best novel is Lolita. Lolita is fourth on a list of the hundred best novels in modern literature. Pale Fire was also placed on that list, namely at number 53. This list was compiled by an American publisher

Vladimir Nabokov was born on April 22, 1899 in Petersburg and grew up in great prosperity. After the revolution of 1917, the family fled to Berlin. From 1919 to 1923, Nabokov studied French and Russian literature and entomology at Trinity College, Cambridge. He then lived in Berlin (1923-1937) and Paris (1937-1940). In 1940, he settled in the United States where he was a lecturer and professor at various universities. Twenty years later, he returned to Europe and has lived since then in the Palace Hotel in Montreux. Nabokov died in 1977.
Vladimir Nabokov made his debut in the 1920s under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin. He wrote the first part of his oeuvre in Russian. From 1940 onwards he wrote in English and began to translate his Russian work into English. Only after the overwhelming success of Lolita in the second half of the 1950s was his reputation established all over the world and he was able to make a living from his writing.
Nabokov is seen as one of the greatest writers, both in English and Russian, of the twentieth century.

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