When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause celebre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty...

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...

"A Russian-born professor struggles to cope with American idioms and idiosyncrasies at a university in upstate New York."

"A collection of letters between Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, Vera"-- Provided by publisher. "The letters of the great writer to his wife--gathered here for the first time--chronicle a decades-long love story and document anew the creative energies of an artist who was always at work,"--Amazon.com.

Written when he was only 24, this is Nabokov's earliest major work and his only full-length play, presented here for the first time in English, the story of which involves an incognito king whose love for the wife of a banished revolutionary brings on the chaos the king has fought to prevent.

The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write--a book very much like The Gift itself.

Nabokov's parody, half poem and half commentary on the poem, deals with the escapades of the deposed king of Zemala in a New England college town.