Stan Kelly-Bootle [to CK:
What I am saying is, did Nabokov have the right to criticize those who
stayed behind? I am thinking for example of Pasternak. Did Nabokov forgive the
murdered?] My answer is YES, VN has the right to criticize
anything/anyone about which/whom he is critical. We, in turn, have the right to
review specific criticisms and judge their merits.
C.Kunin: Was Pasternak
really that much more a novelist of ideas (which was what VN purported to
despise about him, and others) than was Tolstoy? ... Did Nabokov ever
attack the truly ridiculous ideas of Tolstoy? It seems to me possible that there is some kind of suppression of guilt
feelings going on in some of VN's more outrageous attitudes to Soviet
writers.
V.Nabokov (Strong
Opinions) "I differ from Joseph Conradically...Ever since the days when such
formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, a person called Tagore, another
called Maxim Gorky, a third called Romain Rolland, used to be accepted as
geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called
'great books'. That, for instante, Mann's asinine "Death in Venice" or
Pasternak's melodramatic and vively written "Zhivago" or Faulkner's corncobby
chronicles can be considered "masterpieces," or at least what journalists call
"great books," is to me an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes
love to a chair."(Vintage,57)
"In the first years after the Bolshevik
revolution..one could still distinguish, through the dreadful platitudes of
Soviet propaganda the dying voice of an earlier culture...Its jackbooted baboons
have gradually exterminated the really talented authors, the special individual,
the fragile genius. One of the saddest cases is perhaps that of Osip Mandelshtam
- a wonderful poet, the greatest poet among those thriving to
survive in Russia under the Soviets - whom that brutal and imbecile
administration persecuted and finally drove to death in a remote concentration
camp. The poems he heroically kept composing until madness eclipsed his limpid
gifits are admirable specimens of a human mind at its deepest and highest.
Reading them enchances one's healthy contempt for Soviet ferocity"
(V,58)
"There were a few writers who discovered that if
they chose certain plots...they could get away... Ilf and Petrov, two
wonderfully gidted writers, decided that if they had a rascal
adventurer...whatever they wrote about his adventures could not be criticized
from a political point of view...any picaresque charater - could not be accused
either of being a bad Communist or not being a good Communist... The poets had a
parallel system...if they stuck to the garden...then yhey were safe. Zabolotski
found a third method of writing...All these
people were enormously gifted but the soviet regime finally caught up with them
and they disappeared, one by one, in nameless camps."(V, 87/88)
[...] I read (Blok and Mendelshtam) in my
boyhood...I have remained passionately fond of Blok's lyrics. His long pieces
are weak...As to Mandelshtam, I also knew him by heart, but he gave me a less
fervent pleasure. Today, through the prism of a tragic fate, his poetry seems
greater than it actually is... (V.97)
JM: I copied down
several Nabokov's "Strong Opinions" (YES! Stan. How else can we think if
not by elaborating over our's and another's true opinions?) I
suggest we depart from factual wordings, not from distorted
recollections, lest we overween...