ABSTRACT
LECTURES ON RUSSIAN LITERATURE Even before leaving Europe for America, Nabokov had conceived the idea of supporting himself and his family by lecturing in English on Russian literature. He apparently produced during 1940-41 a monumental 2,000 pages oflecture notes, enough for 100 lectures figured at twenty pages per hour.1 The first lectures actually to be delivered-except for a single one presented in February at Wells College-were given at Wellesley College in March 1941: “The T echnique of the Russian Novel,” “The Short Stories of Gorky and Chekhov,” “The Proletarian Novel,” “The Soviet Drama,” “The Soviet Short Story.” Alas, the full texts of these early performances do not seem to have survived; Nabokovs Eliminations on the “proletarian novel” would doubtless have made lively reading. At any rate, the lectures were so successful that Nabokov was invited back to Wellesley for the entire academic year 1941-42. In the interim he taught two summer courses at Stanford, one of them on Russian literature.
