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Re: Coates review of Krushcheva's IMAGINING RUSSIA
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NABOKV-L <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote: EDNOTE. From Coates's review. -- SES] Khrushcheva professes to love Nabokov, but she puts much more heart into thrashing him: for his "conceit, coldness and emphatic indifference to all us ordinary folks, unworthy of his genius"; for his "contempt of the Russian tradition of socially minded literature"; for his "heartlessness," his "unmitigated arrogance," his "vanity and airs" and his skewering of other writers; for his "lack of 'physical' heroism" in contrast to Osip Mandelstam, dead in the gulag;
James Studdard writes in response to Laurence Hochard:
L.H., I agree with some of your evaluation of the book but I am constrained to believe that any author who calls Dostoyevski a hack, pamphleteer; relegates Oscar Wilde to a "writer of children's books," criticises his (O.W.'s) french; and for the 'look down the nose, denouement' say that Freud was a Viennese quack, might be thought of as an insufferable, arrogant, popinjay. I think it is rather naieve of Mr. Coates to even suggest that Nabokov is the first prophet to be anointed with vitriol. How about Jesus?
J. Aisenberg re to Khrushcheva and Studdard: clearly for the woman to have made remarks like those above about Nabokov's contempt for common folks, as opposed to say "recieved wisdom", seems like the mark of a shallow reader. And Nabokov's contempt for the tradition of socially minded literature (itself a complicated matter) was, I thought, a healthy response to those solemn types who go around putting all sorts of "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts" on everything and everybody, types embarrassed that literature might be fun or amusing, that it might not seem to be "respectably employed"; who inist the only serious literature builds houses for the homeless and frees the world of slavery, itself a kind of grim ignoble slavery (it's funny that Nabokov's liberated view of art should somehow have been turned around by so many concerned critics and made to seem constrictive and inhuman, when it's plaster the great busts and frowning sanctimony he was fleeing). "Heartless"? Poor
Dolores Haze is hardly the invention a heartless arrogant brute. Sure Nabokov was vain and liked to air his airs, but it was harmless enough, and what kind of good artist doesn't have an inflated ego: in the the world of hard knocks and harsh lessons one soon discovers that if you don't tart up your own accomplishments no one else is going to. K's taking Nabokov to task for his physical cowardice and flogging him with his survival of history, unlike Mandelshtam, is particularly annoying and offensive. Its the kind of dubious definition of courage which has needlessly destroyed so many valuable lives. K seems constitutionally incapable of understanding the courage of Nabokov's thought and art and butterflies, the intregity of which he dedicated his life to, even when he was practically starving to death. Unlike Studdard I think its great fun to read Nabokov taking pot shots at "great" writers. As to Dostoyevsky, I was surprised to find when I read N.'s lecture on The
Brother's Karamozov that he actually liked it more than I did! Hysteria and rabid anti-semitism don't make for an appetizing read. I loved Joseph Heller's novel Catch Twenty-Two, but Nabokov called it type-writer's diarrhea; I think the novel's a classic but I still laughed, just the way I did when read Heller's book.
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