1999年我在牛津大学访学时,发现该校俄语专业学生所用的俄国文学史教科书为一位名叫“米尔斯基”(D.S.Mirsky)的俄国流亡学者所撰;2009年我以富布赖特学者身份在耶鲁大学斯拉夫系访学,发现该系师生依然以所谓“米尔斯基文学史”(Mirsky’s history)为教学蓝本。后来,我又先后读到关于此书的两个评断:第一句话出自纳博科夫之口,他称此书为“用包括俄语在内的所有语言写就的最好一部俄国文学史”;第二 When I visited Oxford in 1999, I discovered that Russian school history textbooks used by Russian majors were written by a Russian exiled scholar named “Mirsky”. In 2009, Visiting Wright Slavs, a Wright Scholar, found that teachers and students still used the so-called “Mirsky’s history” as a teaching blueprint. Later, I read two separate remarks on the book: the first sentence was written by Nabokov, who described the book as “the best Russian literature written in all languages, including Russian History ”; second