Translated from English by Sergey Antonov, Inna Bernstein, Viktor Golyshev, Grigory Dashevsky, Elena Kasatkina, Natalia Krotovskaya, Valentina Kulagina-Yartseva, Maria Mushinsky . In "Lectures on foreign literature", first published in 1980, the largest Russian-American writer of the twentieth century Vladimir Nabokov appeared before his fans, who knew him mainly as a virtuoso artist of the word, in other, sometimes unexpected guises. thoughtful reader, insightful, meticulous and at the same time very biased researcher, temperamental and demanding teacher . The book is based on the lecture course “Masters of European Prose”, prepared for students at Cornell University, where the writer taught in the 1940s and 1950s. In the pages of this volume, Nabokov-lecture gives his audience an excellent lesson of "stiff reading" of the works of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust and James Joyce .