EDNOTE. NABOKV-L thanks Carolyn Kunin for this note. Although I am averse to discussion of VN's political views, I would add one thought. I suspect the recent discussion reflects  a generation gap. As one who was an adult (more or less) in the fifties and especially one who knew many emigres, I find nothing in any way surprising about VN's outspoken anti-Communism and his wholesale extension of this view to those less ardent than himself. It is now half a hundred years later and his views may seem less than temperate to a new generation. It would perhaps be more charitable to drop the matter and recall that VN's remarks about Chaplin, Roman Jakobson, and Sartre et al. were lapses from his principled distaste for politics in  art and scholarship.
   
----- Original Message -----
From: Carolyn Kunin
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Monday, April 21, 2003 11:04 AM
Subject: anti-communism and Nabokov

It is sometimes difficult for Westerners, even now, to understand anti-communism. The reasons for this are too complicated to go into, but I would like to suggest that anyone interested in this question would do well to look at Martin Amis' Koba the dread; Laughter and the twenty millions (I hope I got that right). Mr Amis tries to understand this phenomenon. No one would think of asking why Nabokov would not have wanted to meet, say, the conductor von Karajan, whose Nazi sympathies are well known, but the question can still arrise as to why he wouldn't want to meet Chaplin, whose communist sympathies are also well known.

Martin Amis, for whom Nabokov serves as a political beacon, tries to come to terms with this problem and the book, though not without faults, is well worth reading for anyone interested in Nabokov's political thought.

Carolyn Kunin