IN 1836, a few months before Pushkin died in a duel, the Russian review journal Telescope published the first letter in the collection that came to be known as Philosophical Letters by the Russian aristocrat and former army officer Pyotr Chaadaev. For some.years, the letters, written originally in French,had been circulating secretly among the Westernised Russians in Moscow and St. Petersburg--among the rootless elite that Peter the Great had created in his attempt to make Russia more like Western Europe. But the publication of the first letter inRussian was, in the words of Alexander Herzen, who read it ec-statically while in exile, like "a shot going off in the dark night."It was, later readers would say, the beginning of intellectual life in Russia.

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In these eleven extended pieces - brought together for the first time - Naipaul charts more than half a century of personal enquiry into the mysteries of written expression and of fiction in particular. Here are his boyhood experiences of reading books and his first youthful efforts at writing them; the early glimmers and the evolution of ideas about the proper relation of particular literary forms to particular cultures and identities. Here, too, are Naipaul's observations on his putative literary forebear, Conrad, and the moving preface he wrote to the only book his father ever published. And in his celebrated Nobel lecture, 'Two Worlds', Naipaul reflects on the full scope of his career, rounding off the volume as an intellectual autobiography. A remarkable companion piece to his previous volume of highly acclaimed essays, The Writer and the World, and sustained by extraordinary powers of expression and thought, Literary Occasions is a stirring contribution to the fading art of the critic, and a revelation as well of a life in letters, in its many exemplary instances.

Introduction  vii

Prologue: Reading and Writing, a Personal Account  3

PAR T ONE

East Indian  35

Jasmine  45

Prologue to an Autobiography  53

Foreword to The Adventures of Gurudeva  112

Foreword to A House for Mr. giswas  128

PART TWO

Indian Autobiographies  139

The Last of the Aryans  146

Theatrical Natives  157

Conrad's Darkness and Mine  162

Postscript: Two Worlds (The Nobel Lecture)  181

Index  197