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I enjoyed thinking about what Nabokov was assigning to his students: "Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Gustave
by ralphleon 14y ago
I enjoyed thinking about what Nabokov was assigning to his students:
"Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Robert Louis Stevenson"
Looks like I'll be reading Metamorphosis( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis) tonight!
- gruseom 14y agoNabokov's lectures on all those writers were published as a book, and it's very good.
- paganel 14y agoPlease also give it a try and read Gogol's "Dead Souls". I don't know how to explain it, but I think is the book that best explains the 20th century (even though it was written in the 1840s). Yes, Gogol was that good.
- gruseom 14y agoDead Souls, absolutely, but also the stories (The Nose and The Overcoat, at a minimum). Gogol is a one-of-a-kind genius. He is one of the funniest writers who ever lived, poignant, and utterly insane in the purest Russian way. He had an enormous influence, all of it good. I love Gogol!
- Steko 14y agoGood choice, Nabokov placed Kafka's Metamorphosis second only to Ulysses as a 20th century novel (as of 1965): http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter05.txt http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter05.txt My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's Transformation, Biely's Petersburg, and the first half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time.