Re: VN & Mark Twain

The request may be gratuitous, but I ask the moderator not to disallow this post. Politics has an important place in the work of Nabokov and, like sex, religion, and death, a central place in life and literature. There were severe limits to which these subjects could be discussed in a proper Victorian drawing room or public school, but surely not in an intellectual forum on the Internet.

And please, Dmitri Nabokov: My father too was a wonderful person notwithstanding that he shared some of the opinions of Vladimir Nabokov of which I am most critical. It is not my intention to flog the memory of your father, a Mensch, and whose work I treasure, but I think the comparison with Mark Twain is instructive.

It can only be a rich humanism that led Nabokov to have noted the late development of deep fellow feeling in Western literature over the course of its history, and he brought his own compassion and intelligence to bear in his work with respect to Soviet totalitarianism. But, although I believe Nabokov spoke out regarding institutional racism in the United States (yes?), he never to my knowledge showed much of an understanding of how people acting in concert could right historical wrongs, and at a time when anti-communism (a seductive half-truth) provided license for all manner of evil, he, as far as I know, turned a blind eye to, or else misperceived the nature of, the crimes of the foreign policy of his adopted nation, the United States--which included the overthrow of democratically elected governments, support and armament of cruel dictators, well documented war crimes in Indochina, where more than three million people were killed, and a role in the Guatemalan genocide which has been recognized as disgraceful by, among others, the Inspector General of the CIA.

No wonder of it. In this, Nabokov shared the societal mind set, which was that of a majority of his fellow citizens. Some of life's lessons are dearly bought, paid for by others, and not learned until (so to speak) after death. When I told the Reverend Dan Berrigan how General Merrill McPeak, who had flown more than 250 missions as a fighter pilot in Vietnam and who today speaks with authority against bellicosity, told me (while I was filming him for my film, Deadly Mistakes), "We were on the wrong side in that war," Berrigan replied, "Better late than never."

Mark Twain had his own attitude and manner of being with respect to American acts of institutional homicide. The toll of the conquest of the Philippenes more than 200,000 people, wasn't it? Mark Twain not only spoke out against the killing and against all manner of injustice, but he helped to organize active opposition, serving for a decade as Vice President of the Anti-Imperialist League.

In 1900, Mark Twain wrote in the New York Herald, "I bring you the stately nation named Christiandom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippenes, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies."

This tone of righteous indignation would decades later be appropriate in speaking of the crimes and hypocrisy of Bolshivism, but Mark Twain had the vision and iconoclasm to speak out and bring himself to bear against the offenses of those who exercised power in America and who claimed to act in the name of America, and in the name of what Americans ourselves hold dear: freedom and democracy.