Poets & Writers Theater

“What I really want to produce is that sob in the spine of the honest reader.” In this rare interview with Vladimir Nabokov, he discusses his novel Lolita, American motels, and authorial intention with celebrated literary critic Lionel Trilling on the CBC’s program, “Close-Up.”

Ever wonder what it must have been like to sit in on a class taught by Vladimir Nabokov? Christopher Plummer plays the great Russian author, who taught at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, from 1948 to 1959, in this magnificently odd clip from 1989.