Vladimir Nabokov was forced to leave his native Russia in 1919 at the age of twenty to escape what he called "the bloated octopus of the state." He took with him a passionate love for his homeland and for the "fiery, fanciful, free" literature of his countrymen, intensified later by the knowledge that the Soviet government had dedicated itself to smothering the independence and creativity that had flourished before the Bolshevik Revolution. For Nabokov the great Russian writers of the 19th century were more than artists; they were the last unfettered voices from the land of his birth. It was, therefore, with a spirit of angry nostalgia augmented by his admiration for literary art that Nabokov delivered these lectures.