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Nabokov lectures on russian literature6/28/2023 ![]() The relevant lines are drawn (and gauntlets thrown down) in the opening lecture, ''Russian Writers, Censors, and Readers,'' in which Nabokov lauds the imaginative originality of 19th-century Russian literature and its staunch resistance to censorship, then lambastes both Russian writers of recent vintage and their oppressors, ''the Soviet police state.'' Predictably opposed to such anti-imaginative institutions as Socialist Realism, Nabokov reiterates his credo of art as invention, even ''play'' - and sneers at any art that gives houseroom to any propaganda (airily dismissing, for example, ''the special delivery stories of Gorki, or Thomas Mann''). The present batch (used in his other regular course, ''Russian Literature in Translation'') shows this assured writer-scholar on his own literary and linguistic turf, and it is an Olympian, sardonic, peremptory, persnickety delight. This remarkably lively compendium of literary instruction and opinion is a follow-up publication to last year's much-acclaimed ''Lectures on Literature,'' the ''written-out notes for delivery as classroom lectures'' used in the ''Masters of European Fiction'' course that Nabokov taught at Cornell from 1948 to 1958. ![]()
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