My paper examines Nabokov's Cornell courses on Russian and foreign literature as published in two volumes. I try to show how the teaching of literature left its traces in his own fiction. The literature courses are also viewed as a literary manifesto in which the desire to define and educate "the good reader" is motivated not only by pedagogical aims but by strategic ones. Notwithstanding that this labelling of "good" and "bad" readers can be seen as the author's tyranny(CF how N.'s hatred of certain writers may alienate their readers), N. reminds us that reading is also a GIFT (DAR). N.'s classes teach one to love writers, to look at literature as at the irreal, having thrown off our reflexes for mimetic illusion. Thanks to this conception of "reading", N. succeeds in measuring the storyteller, the teacher, and the enchanter.