> It just strikes me as odd (at least it strikes me now, since the subject was recently thrust unwanted upon us) that this aspect of your father's work has not - - so far as I can recall - - been addressed by any of his serious critics.

 

As one poet said to his future commentator: Why must one always bring up pornographic record? I question that critic who will place his undivided attention on single piece of chalk, putting aside all the rest of the tools and tricks of trade on master’s palette can be called serious. Those who ruminate on that record or on lack of social responsibility or on perceived VN’s plagiarism do so with moronic seriousness and with monotony of the assembly line or a party line. How much more serious you want these ‘critics’ to get? Or may be we should start taking them seriously because they attached their books to Nabokov’s studies? I wouldn’t. Why? In confrontation with assembly line genius always wins.

 

I think it was artistically challenging for VN to tread on the boundary of philistine genre and produce masterpieces, almost like walking on the edge and consistently coming through. VN used like ‘sexually and socially minded’ themes in his novels as prime coating of a kind: while it is there it does not distracts nor attracts the reader, - that is unless the reader is already distracted or corrupted. In that regard he was direct opposite to George Orwell who knew how to finish all his novels in prime coating. In my view, in case of Ada, being lepidopterist and writer, VN artistically tested Ada and Van’s norm of acceptable while pushing them as human species to the extreme of possible. May be extremes of one balanced the other while producing desired effect? I also find it curious that with shift from Russian to English literature he used more of this ‘record’ as opposed to socially minded. Is it a coincidence that his biggest Russian (Dar) and English (Ada) are almost direct opposites in that regard (as two reversed first letters of their titles suggest)?

 

George Shimanovich

----- Original Message -----
From: Carolyn Kunin <mailto:chaiselongue@earthlink.net>  
To: D. Barton Johnson <mailto:chtodel@cox.net>  
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2005 10:44 AM
Subject: FW: what a pure, gentle, funny, utterly normal man he was



Dear Dmitri,

I was very glad to read both your letter to Don and his reply. And if any of my comments recently have added in any way to your distress I beg your forgiveness. Your description of your father was a tonic: what a pure, gentle, funny, utterly normal man he was.

I have no doubt that if I had met him, this is the person I should have met. He was after all the creator of Pnin, and for that alone should be remembered with gratitude forever.  

But he also created Pnin's destroyer. He created Lolita, but he also created Humbert & Quilty. He created Aqua, but he also created Marina who probably murdered her, not to mention Vaniada. His ability to imagine evil, especially sexual evil, is so fiendishly good, is it any wonder it gives some of us pause?

The "porno-graph record" as you so wittily call it, was an aspect of your father's work too. It just strikes me as odd (at least it strikes me now, since the subject was recently thrust unwanted upon us) that this aspect of your father's work has not - - so far as I can recall - - been addressed by any of his serious critics. Or am I mistaken?

It does seem that, perhaps just for the reason  that his serious critics have chosen to ignore this aspect of his work, that it has taken on the quality of an elephant in the room. Someone points to it, and we are all surprise and shock. Elephant? what elephant?

But the pornographic aspect is there still and all. Maybe you are correct, and it is the virtuosity of your father's imagination that explains its force. His brilliant portrayal of the insane homosexual Kinbote never for a moment caused me to think he might himself be either homosexual or insane.  No one who takes him seriously can possibly confuse him with pervert Humbert.

But there do seem to be some things about Nabokov we still don't know.

freundliche Grüsse von Deine
Carolyn