492 Nabokov Noir (with Luke Parker)
The History of Literature
00:00
Was Nabokov a Scholar of Russian Literature?
I was surprised when I first encountered Nabokov, he's got such a different sensibility from what I was expecting. He doesn't feel even in his Russian works very Russian. There's this huge boom at the beginning of the 20th century in Tolstoy and particularly the Stayevsky with Constance Garnet. This kind of Russian literature is the thing. And we see that he actually does fit a particular line of Russian literature that doesn't translate as well.
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