Good Readers and Good Writers

.The following is Nabokov’s introduction to his Lectures on Literature, a series of lectures he gave covering Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Robert Luis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Marcel Proust’s The Walk by Swann’s Place [i.e., Swann’s Way], Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Time and space, the colors of the seasons