Littérature, tome 2

If Nabokov sparkled in those lectures on European authors, here in his commentaries on the great 19th-century Russian writers - Gogol, Turgenev, Gorki, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Chekhov - he is completely in his element. "Not only did these writers represent to him the absolute height of Russian literature (with Pushkin, of course)," Fredson Bowers notes, "but they also flourished counter to the utilitarianism that he despised both in the social critics of the time and, more bitingly, in its later Soviet development." They were the last unfettered voices of his lost homeland.

As Nabokov guides readers through intricacies of plot and character, meticulously supplemented with facts about 19th-century Russian, he again demonstrates his brilliance as a teacher and his ability to enchant. Thirty-eight illustrations give evidence of the care with which he prepared these celebrated lectures.