Lectures on russian literature

'Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pushed apart, squashed and then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then and only then its true flavour will be appreciated at its full worth...' Vladimir Nakokov left his native Russia at the age of twenty to escape what he called 'the bloated octopus of the state.' In this volume are published his lectures on the great novelists of nineteenth-century Russian literature, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Chekov, and Gorki - the last unfettered voices from the land of his birth.