The acclaimed author presents his unique insights into the works of great Russian authors including Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Gogol, Gorki, and Chekhov. 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...

Here, for the first time, the stories of one of the century's greatest prose stylists are collected in a single, comprehensive volume. Written from the early 1920s - the years of his exile from Russia - to the mid-1950s, when he abandoned the story form and turned to his English-language masterpieces Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, these stories reveal the fascinating progress of Nabokov's early development as they remind us that we are in the presence...

When Paduk, the new dictator and head of the Party of the Average Man, seeks the support of Professor Adam Krug, he gets no cooperation--until he takes Krug's son.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a perversely magical literary detective story - subtle, intricate, leading to a tantalizing climax - about the mysterious life of a famous writer. Many people knew things about Sebastian Knight as a distinguished novelist, but probably fewer than a dozen knew of the two love affairs that so profoundly influenced his career, the second one in such a disastrous way. After Knight's death, his half brother sets out...

Hermann is a German chocolate manufacturer, who lives in bourgeois comfort with his pleasing but stupid Russian wife and her drunken cousin. On a business trip to Prague, Hermann stumbles across a man he believes to be his double and starts plotting to turn this encounter to his advantage.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the original title of a novella written by the famous Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson that was first published in 1886. The work is commonly known today as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or simply Jekyll & Hyde. It is about a London lawyer named John Gabriel Utterson who investigates strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, and the evil Edward Hyde....

One of the best-loved of Nabokovs novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950's. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable...

Humbert, a divorced British professor, travels to small-town America for a teaching position. He allows himself to be swept into a relationship with Charlotte, whom he marries in order that he might pursue her 14-year-old daughter, Lolita.

The story of the passion of a middle-aged man for a young teenager.