................................................................................................................................................................
To provide a few other short cuts for those who are interested in this
theme, here are a few other references:
Writers Nabokov (Dis)Likes
A badly-referenced collation
of Nabokov’s literary likes and dislikes:
Listed by author: – “I go by books, not by authors” –
VN
Likes
Samuel Beckett – (but not his plays) “Beckett is
the author of lovely novellas and wretched plays in the Maeterlinck tradition.
The trilogy is my favourite, especially Molloy.”
Andrei Bely – “Petersburg is
a splendid fantasy”
Bergson
Alexander Blok
Robert Browning
Lewis
Carroll
Anton Chekhov
Norman Douglas
Emerson
Gustave
Flaubert
Franz Kafka
Nikolai Gogol (non-Ukrainian stories)- “at his best,
he is incomparable and inimitable”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Franz Hellens –
“Speaking of precursors of the New Novel, there is F H, a Belgian, who is very
important … I tried to get someone in the States to publish him … but nothing
came of it.”
Housman
Ilf and Petrov
James Joyce (Ulysses, at least –
not Finnegans Wake)
John Keats
Jorge Luis Borges – “Borges is … a man of
infinite talent”
Hermann Melville
Osip Mendalstam
John Milton
Yuri
Olesha
Edgar Allen Poe (but only as a youth)
Proust
Pushkin
Raymond
Queneau – “Q’s Exercises in Style is a thrilling masterpiece and, in fact, one
of the greatest stories in French Literature. I am also very fond of
Q’sZazie.”
Rimbaud
Alain Robbe-Grillet – “His fiction is magnificently
poetical and original”
J D Salinger
William Shakespeare
Laurence Sterne
– “I love Sterne”
Leo Tolstoy (some) – “I consider Anna Karenin the supreme
masterpiece of c19th literature. It is closely followed by The Death of Ivan
Ilyich … “
Ivan Turgenev
John Updike
Verlaine
H G Wells – “his
romances and fantasias are superb”, “a writer for whom I have the deepest
admiration is HGW … I could talk endlessly about Wells”
Mikhail
Zoshchenko
Dislikes
Bertolt Brecht
Bryusov
Michel
Butor – “I do not care for Butor.”
Albert Camus – “It is a shame he [Franz
Hellens] is read less than that awful Monsieur Camus.”
Cervantes (“a cruel
and crude book”)
Joseph Conrad – “I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir-shop
style” – “I differ from Joseph Conradically.”
Theodore Dreiser
Fyodor
Dostoevsky (his best work is The Double, “a shameful imitation of Gogol’s The
Nose“) – “I dislike intensely The Karamazov Brothers and the ghastly Crime and
Punishment“
Ilya Ehrenberg
T S Eliot – “the not quite
first-rate”
William Faulkner – “Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles”
John
Galsworthy
Nikolai Gogol (Ukrainian stories only) – “at his worst … he is a
worthless writer”
Maxim Gorky
Ernest Hemingway (except for “The Killers”
and “the wonderful fish story”)
Henry James – “I really dislike him
intensely”, apart from the odd turn of phrase
James Joyce (Finnegans Wake, A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but not Ulysses) – “I detest Punningans
Wake” – “the unfortunate Finnegans Wake isnothing but a formless and dull mass
of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next
room, most aggravating to the insomniac” – “Actually, I never liked A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man. I find it a feeble and garrulous book.”
Nikos
Kazantzakis
D H Lawrence (Lady Chatterley’s Lover
certainly)
Lorca
Thomas Mann (the “asinine” Death in Venice
certainly)
Odoevski
Boris Pasternak – “Pasternak’s melodramatic and vilely
written Zhivago”
Plato
Luigi Pirandello – “I never cared for
Pirandello”
Ezra Pound – “the pretentious nonsense of Mr.Pound, that total
fake”
Romain Rolland
Jean-Paul Sartre – “and even more awful [than Camus]
Monsieur Sartre.”
Rabindranath Tagore
Leo Tolstoy (others) – “I detest
Resurrection, I detest The Kreutzer Sonata … War and Peace, though a little too
long, is a rollicking historical novel”, though basically written for
children
Thomas Wolfe
Yevgeny Yevtushenko -”I’ve seen his work. Quite
second-rate. He’s a good Communist.”
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Writers for
children
G K Chesterton
Arthur Conan Doyle
Joseph Conrad
Rudyard
Kipling
Tolstoy (War and Peace only)
Oscar Wilde
Not familiar
with
John Barth
Thomas
Pynchon
References:
17 June 1962 NYHT Books
Interview
Paris Review interview
BBC Audio Interview – 4th Oct
1969
Wisconsin Studies, 1968
Playboy, 1964
TV-13 NY,
1965
Conversations with Nabokov, Novel: A Forum on Fiction (Spring,
1971)
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/02/lifetimes/nab-v-obit.html "He
was introduced to the American literary scene by Edmund Wilson, the late critic,
in whose home at Westport, Conn., he wrote his first poem in the United States.
The two were intimate friends until the late 1950's, when, according to Mr.
Nabokov, "a black cat came between us—Boris Pasternak's novel 'Doctor
Zhivago.'"
Mr. Nabokov called the book third-rate and clumsy while Mr. Wilson
praised it. "He started the quarrel," Mr. Nabokov said, and it was exacerbated
in 1963 when Mr. Nabokov published his annotated English version of "Eugene
Onegin," Alexander Pushkin's romantic novel in verse form.
Mr. Wilson
attacked the translation, hinting that Mr. Nabokov's Russian was faulty. Their
donnish dispute raged in The New York Review of Books until their friendship was
ruptured." Alden Whitman (1977).
Segal, Lee: "Under Cover". The Louisville Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY),
25-Jan-59, Section 4, p.7 Juliar H11
Editorial with a few verbatim quotes
from an interview with Nabokov by Arthur Turley of Associated Press on Lolita
and Pasternak. "Vladimir Nabokov: The Interviews" by Dieter E. Zimmer (1994 –
2008)
"The
master's sarcasm, his contempt for those inadequately endowed to penetrate, let
alone judge, his work, was legend. As were his magisterially dismissive verdicts
on such vulgar frauds as Dostoevsky, Freud, Faulkner or Balzac.
It may take
generations to unravel what there is in these celebrated damnations of
deliberate provocation and what there is of autonomous insight. The allowed
pantheon is small: Flaubert, Gogol, Pushkin, Proust and Joyce. Where a potential
rival looms, the mechanisms of defensive denigration are almost instantaneous.
Nabokov on Pasternak does not make for pleasant reading." (Georg Steiner)
http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2012/02/nabokov-on-lolita-humbert-doesnt-know-a-hawk-from-a-handbag-i-do/:
"I
learned a few things from these videos: According to Mr. Nabokov, I am a
philistine. I confess that I am, on occasion, "a user of cozies" - tea
cozies, anyway. Who knew it was so easy? On those who think his book is
about sex? "But maybe they think in clichés. For them sex is so well-defined
there's a gap between it and love. They don't know what love is, and perhaps
they don't know what sex is, either." What does it all mean? "I leave the field
of ideas to Dr. [Albert] Schweitzer and Dr. Zhivago." He doesn't miss a chance
to get in a dig at Boris Pasternak.Responses to "Nabokov on Lolita: "I leave the
field of ideas to Dr. Schweitzer and Dr. Zhivago." " Elena Danielson Says
(February 28th, 2012) "Thanks so much Cynthia for finding this video,
where VN is gleefully putting us on, and visibly
enjoying LT's
cluelessness..VN left a lot of clues for future readers.[ ] Watching VN
drinking out of a tea cup, I think VN would approve of your tea cozies.but not
of Pasternak, note the snarky reference to Dr. Zhivago.which was competing with
his beloved Lolita on the Time Magazine best seller list.VN had to leave for
French speaking Switzerland just as Thomas Mann had to flee the US for German
speaking Switzerland.Death in Venice is a more serious treatment of the Lolita
theme.VN has a lot in common with Mann, whom he intensely disliked, both were
competing divas who needed an American audience, but were horrified by the
results."