Reddit reviews Lectures on Russian Literature

Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature is a book of lectures that immediately comes to mind. Haven't read it myself (yet) but I'm a big fan of his novels and he's a pretty popular critic. Fair warning, he doesn't like Dostoevsky.

I agree with this! Russian literature has been my main focus for years and I bought Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature to see what he had to say about my favorite authors. It was so mindblowing that I ended up buying his Lectures on Literature, which covers a wide variety of proper literature, and since I didn't want spoilers, I just worked my way through most of them. It widened my scope a lot and I felt more safe to just enjoy and experience the novels because I knew I'd get a proper analysis immediately afterwards.

In the longer-term, reading both of those books and the books they were about, significantly improved my ability to understand literature.