Subject
TEXNABSTRACT
Date
Body
EDITOR'S Note: Another abstract (again mine own) from the April 1995
Nabokov Conference in Texas.
-------------------------------
THE ODD COUPLE: VLADIMIR NABOKOV & AYN RAND
D. Barton Johnson
Vladimir Nabokov and Ayn Rand (nee Alisa Rozenbaum), both born in
imperial Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1899 and 1905 respectively, became
best-selling American writers in the late 1950s. Their chef-d'oeuvres of
the period, ATLAS SHRUGGED and LOLITA, have never been out of print.
Most of Ayn Rand's admirers and detractors are, I suspect, little
aware of her Russian cultural background and its impact on her
intellectual and literary development. My paper traces the parallels in
the careers of the two writers, emphasizing Rand's Russian roots. The
great oddity of the whole matter is that both writers, in a sense, took
their literary bearings from a common source: the social-utilitarian
novelist, critic, and political martyr Nikolai Chernyshevsky whose clunky
didactic novel WHAT IS TO BE DONE (1863) became a sacred text for the
liberal Russian intelligentsia. Nabokov presents Chernyshevsky as the bad
seed in Russian cultural history in his novel THE GIFT and his entire
literary career can be seen as a counterattack to what became the dominant
view of literature in the Russia of the XIXth and XXth centuries. Rand,
although despising Chernyshevsky's politics, directly adopted his literary
philosophy and technique, and produced a trio of ideological blockbusters
that are mirror images of the Socialist Realism she abhorred.
What very few American readers were aware of is that Rand and
Nabokov were, respectively, continuing and/or reacting against aspects of
their native Russian literary traditions: Rand, the "realist" utilitarian
ideologue continued the Chernyshevsky model and Nabokov--the modernist
aesthetic inherited from the Symbolists who had arisen in revolt against the
Chernyshevsky tradition.
D. Barton Johnson
Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies
Phelps Hall
University of California at Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Phone and Fax: (805) 687-1825
Home Phone: (805) 682-4618
Nabokov Conference in Texas.
-------------------------------
THE ODD COUPLE: VLADIMIR NABOKOV & AYN RAND
D. Barton Johnson
Vladimir Nabokov and Ayn Rand (nee Alisa Rozenbaum), both born in
imperial Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1899 and 1905 respectively, became
best-selling American writers in the late 1950s. Their chef-d'oeuvres of
the period, ATLAS SHRUGGED and LOLITA, have never been out of print.
Most of Ayn Rand's admirers and detractors are, I suspect, little
aware of her Russian cultural background and its impact on her
intellectual and literary development. My paper traces the parallels in
the careers of the two writers, emphasizing Rand's Russian roots. The
great oddity of the whole matter is that both writers, in a sense, took
their literary bearings from a common source: the social-utilitarian
novelist, critic, and political martyr Nikolai Chernyshevsky whose clunky
didactic novel WHAT IS TO BE DONE (1863) became a sacred text for the
liberal Russian intelligentsia. Nabokov presents Chernyshevsky as the bad
seed in Russian cultural history in his novel THE GIFT and his entire
literary career can be seen as a counterattack to what became the dominant
view of literature in the Russia of the XIXth and XXth centuries. Rand,
although despising Chernyshevsky's politics, directly adopted his literary
philosophy and technique, and produced a trio of ideological blockbusters
that are mirror images of the Socialist Realism she abhorred.
What very few American readers were aware of is that Rand and
Nabokov were, respectively, continuing and/or reacting against aspects of
their native Russian literary traditions: Rand, the "realist" utilitarian
ideologue continued the Chernyshevsky model and Nabokov--the modernist
aesthetic inherited from the Symbolists who had arisen in revolt against the
Chernyshevsky tradition.
D. Barton Johnson
Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies
Phelps Hall
University of California at Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Phone and Fax: (805) 687-1825
Home Phone: (805) 682-4618