This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Deborah Treesman, Fiction Editor at the New Yorker.

Each month, we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

This month, we're going to hear a piece by Vladimir Nabokov, called My Russian Education.

My father was indeed a very active man, but I viewed his activities through a prison of my own.

The story was chosen by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.

His books in English include the novel Snow and the Memoir Istanbul Memories of a City.

The English translation of his most recent novel, The Museum of Innocence, will be released later this month.

He joins us from a studio in Boston.

Hi Orhan.

Hi Deborah.

So what made you want to do a Nabokov piece for the podcast?

Well, this is from Speak Memory, which I love so much.

And there are so many little personal things that make me remember this story.

This is less about Russian education, more about Russian father, actually.

Father's books, breaking up early and doing homework before going to school,

worrying, seeing father, worrying about father's health, this kind of thing is so familiar to me.

That this state with me and their writing here is so beautiful as well.

There are typical Nabokovian writing, paying attention to visual detail, as well as humor, precision of the language,

and an all-embracing tenderness that not only goes to father, but to the whole universe that I like.

It's interesting when I was reading your new novel, The Museum of Innocence,

I thought a little bit of Nabokov's Lolita.

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