One of the twentieth centuryâs greatest novelists offers his take on the Spanish classic. Â The author of Lolita and Pale Fire was not only a master of fiction but a distinguished literary critic as well. In this collection of lectures, which he delivered at Harvard in the early 1950s, Vladimir Nabokov shares insights based on a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the seventeenth-century novel by Miguel de Cervantes, a timeless classic and one of the most deeply influential works in all of Western literature. Â Rejecting the common interpretation of Don Quixote as a warm satire, Nabokov perceives the work as a catalog of cruelty through which the gaunt knight passes. Edited and with a preface by Fredson Bowers, this volume offers âa powerful, critical, and dramatic elaboration of the theme of illusionâ (V. S. Pritchett, The New York Review of Books). Â
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