Russian Friend

I'm tight for time this morning, so I just offer this interesting snippet:

According to biographer Brian Boyd's recent biography, in 1909 the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, then a ten-year-old youngster in St. Petersburg, found few chances to practice his English. He kept up his proficiency by reading the English fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde and G.K. Chesterton. [The Russian Years, Princeton: 1990, p. 79]