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Keys to The Gift: Yuri Leving’s Guide to Nabokov
Reviewed in this essay: Keys to The Gift: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel, by Yuri Leving. Academic Studies Press, 2011. I was a student in Yuri Leving’s Survey of Russian Literature class at Dalhousie University in 2007. He got me hooked on Nabokov, so I was excited when Leving’s new book on a major…
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CHERRYGraph: A Defence of the Don
Don Cherry is like licorice: you love or you hate him. But while licorice is judged according to its primary function as food, Cherry’s work as an actual hockey analyst is ignored by critics who focus on him as a political and cultural symbol. They take for granted that he is a tawdry bombastic caveman,…
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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian Literature
Reviewed in this essay: Lectures on Russian Literature, by Vladimir Nabokov. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002. At Wellesley College in 1941, before he secured financial independence with Lolita (1955), Nabokov was a one-man Russian literature department. Lectures on Russian Literature collects his lessons on Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Gorki and Dostoevsky from that period, including after he…