Indeed, VN’s books are “about pity… confined to the books,” or, as I see it, the kind of pity that results from a character’s conscious, almost artificial effort to pay attention to the people around him. However, on the whole, what predominates is the resigned pity that overwhelms characters and author when they experience wanton cruelty, destruction -  and the transience of  beauty or of an individual’s life as it is expressed or transformed into art: pity caused by mortality and decay.   

Curiously, VN not only pairs beauty and pity in his Lecture on Kafka( “Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.”), but also in his words about Cervantes’ Don Quixote: “His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant.”#  Here, the pity VN has attributed to Don Quixote is of a different sort than the one he expressed in Lolita’s afterword. It’s not “selfish” ( a lamentation caused by the realization that ourselves and our art are condemned to death and destruction) but it arises as an expression of  what’s best in humanity.

In many articles on VN’s ethics and underlying philosophy both kinds of pity are blended into one (the “humanistic” type) and, as I see it, it’s a mistake. After all, VN allows himself to feel “virtual” pity towards most of his characters ( with the very strange exception of Herman Herman), but he can be rather cruel with his readers…As Fran Assa has pointed out we know very little about how pity affected him in his personal life (“he kept his private life very private”), there are occasional hints of kindness and stinginess in his letters and, indirectly, there’s proof of his overwhelming “human” pity in “Pnin,”  when he cringes over Mira’s and her people’s destiny – as it has been amply demonstrated by his scholars.

I searched for an instructive bibliography and found an article on “cruelty” by Leland de la Durantaye which I mention here even before I’ve read it** for VN’s dealings with cruelty are far easier to spot than his “stated and practiced views on art” or his “disguised pattern”.  I must confess that I’m trying to read V.Nabokov not simply as a “great XXth Century author” but as a harbinger of “new surprises,” both in literature as in life.***

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*JM:When Lito (episode 5, “Art [is like] Religion” in “Sense8”, a Netflix series) forgetting his role as a rude character in a Mexican movie began to shed tears, he explained to the director that his grief was caused by the realization that “all beauty is temporary.”… Why was I reminded of Nabokov just then? ” The lines that I had in mind, from his Lecture on Kafka, are: “Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.” …“ Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.” VN was not indicating “human compassion”, was he? [snip] In  VN’s afterword to Lolita we find:  “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” .  Tenderness, kindness, pity? Towards whom?

**The Pattern of Cruelty and the Cruelty of Pattern in Vladimir Nabokov Leland de la Durantaye

Abstract: Few of Nabokov’s readers have begrudged him their admiration, but many their affection. A remarkable number of them — from Calvino to Rorty, Michael Wood, Joyce Carol Oates, Martin Amis and others — have cited his ‘cruelty’ as a reason. This essay traces this charge of cruelty not only to the thematic presence of cruelty in many of his works, but also to Nabokov’s stated and practiced views on art. Central here is his stated indifference to the concerns of ‘average’ readers and his practice of including signs and symbols in his work that point to a disguised pattern difficult both to make out and to interpret. This essay endeavours to clarify Nabokov’s conception and use of pattern in his works and to suggest that it may help clarify the response of many of his readers.

#-Quoted by G.Davenport in the foreword to “Lectures on Don Quixote” p.xix

*** -and I don’t mean death as in ““Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”