I find this refutation of patrician claim quite telling and to the point. It is in Russian literary and critical tradition to zero on written word at expense of reverence. Patricians and elites do not take root in stern Russian culture which Mikhail Bulgakov aptly meant, when comparing them with pineapples in greenhouses.  This is why literary elite became a two word idiom in English but, when translated in Russian, jars ear. Admittedly, ‘patrician’ is thrown around Nabokov by people attached to their ‘twin peaks’, by elite subculture.  Likewise, some ventured in this venue to ridicule VN as ‘god’. Nice try. But there is so much in VN oeuvre that resists canon, while icons of latte modernity, Amis and Below included, practically invite(d) it, alive. I like consistency of destroying canon while not accepting it. If we are to play the ‘greatness’ game, lets use two-part litmus test of canon and be fair.

 

- George Shimanovich

Martin Amis, who views Saul Bellow and Nabokov as his “twin peaks,” his personal novelists of the twentieth century, attempts to explain Nabokov’s wounding evaluation of Bellow by saying that “Nabokov clearly derived sensual pleasure from being dismissive: it is the patrician in him.” This theory is allied to the perception that Nabokov and most of Russia’s émigré intellectuals were subject to for years: as fallen, embittered aristocrats. A frustrating label that Nabokov alluded to in his introduction to The Gift, his longest treatment of the émigré scene in Europe. “We remained unknown to American intellectuals (who, bewitched by Communist propaganda, saw us merely as villainous generals, oil magnates, and gaunt ladies with lorgnettes).” Amis’s theory is as incomplete as the rest. The violence of Nabokov’s dismissals can be attributed both to his wit, which he was always hesitant to leave dormant, and to his distinct artistic sense. There is something either vaguely or powerfully Nabokovian about the strong details he singles out from the stories he loves and those he is sceptical of: they have that distinct, idiosyncratic power that the best of Nabokov’s own details do. His tendency was to dismiss authors who were toiling in what he thought of as a useless and infertile territory of literary exploration. From an analysis of the long list of authors that Nabokov dismissed, we can draw up some demarcations of this negative territory, but it remains both distinct and untraceable, a phantom quantity that is as impressive and formless as the brilliance of Nabokov’s own work.