On 08/06/2010 12:38, "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@HOTMAIL.COM> CITED:Geeky Professor to Sex Icon
Nabokov’s path to Playboy was a far cry from that of Hugh Hefner’s bunnies. Nabokov was a Russian émigré, writer, scholar, chessproblem creator and butterfly collector. He came to the United States in 1940 to teach Russian literature. Having already established a name for himself with his Russian language books, he traveled around the country teaching at Stanford, Wellesley and Harvard. In 1948 Nabokov was lured from the banks of the Charles River to the hills of Ithaca to head the Russian Department at Cornell University, though the department never materialized during his tenure. The first course he taught was Russian Literature, which Nabocovered Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev and eventually Pushkin. Later on, he taught European Literature, in which he delivered his now-famous lectures on James Joyce’s masterpiece, “Ulysses.”