Vladimir Nabokov taught at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959. It was at Cornell that Nabokov composed Lolita and Pnin and conceived Pale Fire. During his Cornell tenure Nabokov also continued his research on lepidoptera, wrote the English and Russian versions of his autobiography, Conclusive Evidence and Drugie Berega, and prepared annotated translations of two pinnacles of Russian The Song of Igor's Campaign and Eugene Onegin. While at Cornell Nabokov also delivered his highly acclaimed lectures on Russian and West European literature. Nabokov at Cornell contains twenty-five chapters by the leading experts on Nabokov. Their subjects range widely from Nabokov's poetry to his prose, from his original fiction to translation and literary scholarship, from literature to visual art, and from the humanities to natural science. The book concludes with a reminiscence of the family's life in Ithaca by Nabokov's son, Dmitri.
Gavriel Shapiro is Professor of Russian Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage (1993), Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokovs Invitation to a Beheading (1998), and The Sublime Artists Studio: Nabokov and Painting (2009), and the editor of Nabokov at Cornell (2003). "