Jansy Mello: Sometimes Edmund Wilson, independently of his Freudian leanings, referred to Nabokov's blindness to a character's cruel streak with more insight than other critics or philosophers in relation to Nabokov and his злой types, like Van Veen or Humbert Humbert (such as Wood, Appel, Trilling, Rorty)
Here is a small selection of E.Wilson's invectives concerning Nabokov's translation of Eugene Oneguin, and other examples, to present to the VN-L, as a part of the "Recycle" program....
It's clear that, in line with Carolyn's inquiry, inspite of all scholarly and critical efforts, there's still a wide field of research open into a deeper understanding about those characters whom Nabokov ousted from the inside of his temple, like evil gargoyles snarling from its external façade (but which remain an integral part of the structure).
Edmund Wilson: "The Nabokov who bores and fatigues by overaccumulation contrasts with the authentic Nabokov and with the poet he is trying to illuminate. It has always seemed to me that Vladimir Nabokov was one of the Russian writers who, in technique, had most in common with Pushkin...Nabokov...short stories and novels are masterpieces of swiftness and wit and beautifully concealed calculation. Every detail is both piquant and relevant, and everything fits together. Why, then, should this not be true of his commentary and his two appendices...It is as if this sure hand at belles lettres, once resolved to distinguish himself as a scholar, has fallen under an oppressive compulsion to prove himself by piling things up...Mr. Nabokov's most serious failure, however...is one of interpretation. He has missed a fundamental point in the central situation. He finds himself unable to account for Evgeni Onegin's behavior in first giving offense to Lensky by flirting with Olga at the ball and then, when Lensky challenges him to a duel, instead of managing a reconciliation, not merely accepting the challenge, but deliberately shooting first and to kill. Nabokov says that the latter act is "quite out of character." He does not seem to be aware that Onegin, among his other qualities, is, in his translator's favorite one-syllable adjective, decidedly злойthat is, nasty, méchant. This note is sharply struck in the opening stanza, when Onegin complains about the slowness in dying of the uncle from whom he is to inherit. This is quite in Evgeni's character, and so is his provoking Lensky by making advances to his fiancée. You are told, just before this happens, that Evgeni is "secretly laughing." that he is "approaching the moment of revenge." What revenge? His revenge on Lensky for being capable of idealism, devoted love, when he himself is so sterile and empty... He thinks Lensky a fool yet he envies him. He cannot stand it that Lenskyfed on German romantic literatureshould be fired by ecstatic emotion. So, taking a mean advantageraising slowly, we are told, his pistol, in malignant cold bloodhe aims to put out that fire. There are no out-of-character actions in Evgeni Onegin. Nabokov has simply not seen the point....Nabokov has also studied exhaustively Pushkin's relations with his Russian predecessors and contemporaries, and there is a good deal of excellent literary criticism. I except from this the literary obiter dicta which are partly the result of Nabokov's compulsion to give unnecessary information: he cannot mention a book, however obscure, which has influenced or been mentioned by Pushkin or which contains something similar to something in Onegin without inserting his opinion of it; and partly the result of his instinct to take digs at great reputations" Cf.July 15, 1965 The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov - Edmund Wilson
Others: In an article written in 1988, The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty, Rorty takes pains to describe Nabokov as a liberal malgré lui-même, who provides a responsible perspective for looking out on society, and a doorway into "participative emotion", like the one which "moved liberal statesmen such as his own father." According to Rorty, the "sinister aestheticism" that leads Nabokov to value style and aesthetic rapture instead of ethics, is a cover-up for the author's conflict with his own humanist dimension. This same fact is also acknowledged by Peter Quenell (in his preface to one of the editions of Lolita), who sees Nabokov as a benevolent humanist, in the European tradition of Rabelais and Montaigne. A. Appel Jr., likewise, described him as "an author whose deeply humanistic art affirms man's ability to confront and order chaos". Terence Rattigan, who sees Lolita as genuinely shocking, as only works of an elevated moral purpose can be, agrees with Lionel Trilling, who states that "Lolita is not a book about sex, it is a book about love." Could it be that Nabokov, as suggested by Rorty, was aware of the link between art and torture? Was he describing his own dilemmas between the nurturing of esthetical pleasure and a certain practice of cruelty? Rorty's answer is based on the three features he sees as most characteristic of Nabokov: his perversely insistent aestheticism, the fear of being led to cruelty by this same aestheticism and his concern with immortality. According to Rorty, Nabokov was desperately trying to believe that "artistic gifts" were "sufficient for moral virtue", even though he knew that there is no possible synthesis between ecstasy and solidarity. In Richard Rorty's opinion, the aestheticism in Nabokov, "one of the most powerful imaginations of the 20th century," nevertheless leads us along a journey of personal growth, since, in reading his books, we are forced to recognize in ourselves forbidden fantasies and emotions, contradictory facets that acquire dialectic expression as they are worked through. According to Rorty, Nabokov did not intend to imitate reality, but rather to modify it, and the reader as well. Rorty manages to find, among the statements of an already mature Nabokov, one that serves to justify his bet. In it, Nabokov defines art as the result of "beauty plus pity"*
According to James Wood, "in his biography of Nikolai Gogol, Nabokov writes that, when a very elevated level is reached, as in Gogol, 'literature is no longer interested in taking pity on the poor devil, or cursing the rich fellow. It aims at that secret depth in the human soul, where the shadows of other worlds pass as the shadows of anonymous and unfathomable ships.' Nabokov believed that "the capacity to wonder at trifles - no matter the imminent peril - these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life, are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is this childish speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic that we know the world to be good", since he maintained "an irrational belief in the goodness of man..." that "becomes something much more than the wobbly basis of idealistic philosophy. It becomes a solid and iridescent truth" Yet, of the pitiable handful of verbs referring to emotion in the book, one is expended in the sentence 'Not that I particularly liked Lenski' (a tutor). And when he fears that his father may have engaged in a duel, he avows dustily that there was 'a tender friendship underlying my respect for my father." When his childhood best friend is killed while fighting with General Deniken against the Bolsheviks, he can only nod toward "richer words than I can muster here." Worst, perhaps, is the suave paragraph he devotes to his brother Sergey's demise in a Nazi concentration camp.
Like Proust's Marcel, Vladimir lies miserable in his darkened bedroom, but there are none of the wrenching emotions culled from the everyday that you find in Proust--the crippling separation anxiety of Maman closing the door and padding downstairs. Instead we get--wonderfully, wonderfully--the quality of light coming from his nanny's door 'some 20 heartbeats' distance' from his bed". Cf. .Delicious Pedantry By James Wood (Monday, April 26, 1999)
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* - Cf. Jansy B. S. Mello: "Lolita: from book to film: Freudians, Keep Out Please"