Subject
[NABOKOV-L] SIGHTING Andrei Bely
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Tom Sutcliffe: Coldcocked by received opinion
Independent
But the other night a friend mentioned that Vladimir Nabokov had once listed the four greatest masterpieces of 20th-century prose, and then uttered a name ...
The week in culture,Friday, 31 December 2010
Excerpts: "There is sometimes a comedy to the cultural life whichis not entirely dignified. What I mean by that is that you can suddenly find that your expectations about a work, and your complacent assumptions about the part you will play in the drama of your encounter with it, are overturned by what actually happens...It happened to me the other day when I went to see the Norman Rockwell exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery... The distinguished New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl gave concise expression to this sentiment about 10 years ago. "Rockwell is terrific," he wrote, "It's become tedious to pretend he isn't." ... John Updike, who knew something about narrative, talked of Rockwell as "always exceeding the necessary", catching rather well the generosity of the pictures, which have a surplus of detail over and above their central theme. So, as I walked towards Dulwich to make my entrance, I pretty much knew the part I was going to play. People are still snobbish about Rockwell (just read Brian Sewell's blazing review if you don't believe that), I thought, but I'll go with the slowly emerging dissenters...I had - this is where the comedy comes in - a mental picture of myself knocking aside the doors of received opinion like a cowboy entering a saloon bar. At which point, received opinion swung back and smacked me in the face...To paraphrase Schjeldahl, it looked as if it was going to be very tedious to pretend that Rockwell was good. And yet I couldn't immediately surrender my wish that he might be...It's time to dig into a decadent Russian novel..."
"...I'm well aware of most of the gaps in my reading...But the other night a friend mentioned that Vladimir Nabokov had once listed the four greatest masterpieces of 20th-century prose, and then uttered a name I'd never heard of (or had forgotten, if I once had). Have a guess at Nabokov's list before you read on. I imagine quite a lot of you may get Joyce or Proust or Kafka (for Ulysses, À la Recherche and Metamorphosis, respectively). But how many of you got Andrei Bely, author of Petersburg, a symbolist novel that was later dismissed as "decadent" by Soviet literary apparatchiks? It's possible that Nabokov was being patriotic here, ensuring that his beloved Russia figured in this truncated account of modern literature, but I doubt that he would have wanted to expose a mediocre work to such challenging company. And since Nabokov could reasonably claim a place in any list of 20th-century prose masters it must surely be worth reading. My first resolution of the year is to set to and fill the pothole. "
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btw: Nabokov was equally critical (in a negative way) of Norman Rockwell and Salvador Dali.
At least, this is what I understood Nabokov's observation to mean before I searched after his reference in "Pnin" and discovered that Rockwell's "Museum curator John Coffey cites scholarly opinions of Rockwell's work, including one from author Vladimir Nabokov: 'Salvador Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by Gypsies in babyhood.' www.thepilot.com/news/.../rockwell-exhibit-brings-surprises/ . "
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