![]() ![]() In ''Crime and Punishment'' Raskolnikov for some reason or other kills an old female pawnbroker and her sister. From this point of view Dostoyevsky is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one - with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between. In all my courses I approach literature from the only point of view that literature interests me - namely the point of view of enduring art and individual genius. By Vladimir Nabokov My position in regard to Dostoyevsky is a curious and difficult one. This article is excerpted from ''Lectures on Russian Literature,'' by Vladimir Nabokov, to be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc./Bruccoli Clark. In these lectures, the Russian-American modernist looks at the 19th-century Russian giant and finds him to have feet of clay. Perhaps the most surprising essay in the new volume - at least for readers who know Nabokov as the master stylist but not as the iconoclastic lecturer - is composed of his classroom lectures on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, part of which is reprinted here. ![]() The project produced, first, a collection of Nabokov's lectures on English, French and German writers, published last year, and, now, a companion volume on Russian writers, to come out in the fall. This treasure trove of the novelist's often unconventional ideas has been the object of an editing project undertaken by the eminent textual scholar Fredson Bowers. Copyright c 1981 by the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov PRECEDE FOLLOWS: Vladimir Nabokov, who died in 1977, left a mass of notes he had used for his lectures on literature at Wellesley and Cornell.
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