Emily Mortimer

Nabokov’s essays on Russian literature are brilliantly funny and iconoclastic. He loves Gogol and hates Dostoyevsky and accuses him of being like the worst kind of sensationalist, journalistic hack. “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.”