James Woods and Richard Lamb, "Discussing Nabokov" (Slate, 1999), mention Nabokov's lecture on Tolstoy. It's when James Wood comments: "Of course how Tolstoy describes the train in which Anna meets Vronsky is important.I don't begrudge Nabokov his emphasis. We love Tolstoy so much because he plants himself so thickly in the middle of his scenes, and pushes his reality toward us, a reality of immense detail: I always remember, with great delight, the impatience with which Levin rouses the doctor who is going to deliver his wife's child. His wife has started labor, and Levin, a new father, thinks that the child is imminent. But the doctor knows better, and takes his time, and offers the frantic Levin breakfast. But what I remember is that the doctor unhurriedly smokes, one after the other, 'thick cigarettes' The detail is so perfect, such an emblem of obstructive dawdling. Nothing is thicker than those thick cigarettes, as Levin watches them slowly dwindle. Nabokov, to my knowledge, does not mention the cigarettes, but it is exactly the kind of detail he would have liked."

 

JM: In a literary universe that isn't sketchily engendered there are thousands of constitutive details, which can be dismissed or chosen without causing damage to one's view of a globalized image. James Woods noted the "emblem of obstructive dawdling" which Tolstoy expressed by the "thickness" of successive "thick cigarettes" (and Wood had just referred to Tolstoy's planting himself "so thickly in the middle of his scenes..."), before he muses: "it is the kind of detail he [Nabokov] would have liked."  And yet, this specific detail was "neglected" by Nabokov. Here we can either conclude that Woods's choice reveals something about himself and not about Nabokov, or that there must be a mystery related to Nabokov's "omission." 

 

I wouldn't have stopped for a minute in doubting that Woods has been expressing his own mixed feelings towards Nabokov, Tolstoy and "thick cigarettes," were it not for having remembered how [ Nab-L Jan 20, 2011] Alexey Sklyarenko mentioned Sigmund Freud's emergence, in "Ada", under the name of a "Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu in the Ardennes."  The frail link lies in Nabokov's wordplay with Freud because, at that time, I'd been led to relate it to Freud's report about a Baroness in labor, one in which her doctor remained as undisturbed as Tolstoy's, until the lady passed from "Ah, mon Dieu, que je souffre!" and "Mein Gott, mein Gott, was für Schmerzen!," to screams in her mother-tongue (in Freud's anedocte, as in Nabokov's "Ada," we find barons and baronesses, instead of a Tolstoy princess.).Would Nabokov's "failure" to dwell on the event Woods has singled out be in, any way, related to Nabokov's familiarity and rejection of Freud's anedocte when, inspite of himself, he'd allowed bits of it to reappear in "Ada"? 

 

That is something no one will ever be able to figure out for, in itself, it's a minor detail in "Ada" and a totally negligible item about Nabokov's lecture on Tolstoy. The simplest conclusion is that Woods was relishing a transient feeling of superiority towards Nabokov (he could spot something that VN didn't). The same kind of smugness (but in relation to Wood) is now infecting me! (it's contagious). Both Woods and Lamb used Freud's - and modern psychoanalytic concepts - in their epistolary debate on Nabokov (they wrote about nabokov's "denial" and "autism").

 

Does this focus on an author's unconscious life significantly improve one's appreciation and critical appraisal of his art? My tentative answer is "No." (thanks to the "sudden light" shed by Don Johnson's paragraph, recently quoted by Jim Twiggs). As I see it every text ( even "our phone number...flaps its wings") reveals something about the person who wrote it ( or who painted, who sung and danced it...). Almost always this resulting opacity in a work of art has to be borne, since it merely offers a glimpse into a "real" dimension from which everyone is shut off ( it's ineffability might produce only a line of "effing" offensive innocuous indelicacies.) However, this doesn't imply in the avoidance of any kind of "psychoanalytic vision" towards "Art," but it surely indicates some of its more obvious limits. And these were angrily (rightfully!) denounced by Nabokov when he wrote about a Freudian "police state of sexual myth."