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Fw: [NABOKV-L] Soviet provincialism?
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Stan Kelly-Bootle [to CK: What I am saying is, did Nabokov have the right to criticize those who stayed behind? I am thinking for example of Pasternak. Did Nabokov forgive the murdered?] My answer is YES, VN has the right to criticize anything/anyone about which/whom he is critical. We, in turn, have the right to review specific criticisms and judge their merits.
C.Kunin: Was Pasternak really that much more a novelist of ideas (which was what VN purported to despise about him, and others) than was Tolstoy? ... Did Nabokov ever attack the truly ridiculous ideas of Tolstoy? It seems to me possible that there is some kind of suppression of guilt feelings going on in some of VN's more outrageous attitudes to Soviet writers.
V.Nabokov (Strong Opinions) "I differ from Joseph Conradically...Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, a person called Tagore, another called Maxim Gorky, a third called Romain Rolland, used to be accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called 'great books'. That, for instante, Mann's asinine "Death in Venice" or Pasternak's melodramatic and vively written "Zhivago" or Faulkner's corncobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces," or at least what journalists call "great books," is to me an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair."(Vintage,57)
"In the first years after the Bolshevik revolution..one could still distinguish, through the dreadful platitudes of Soviet propaganda the dying voice of an earlier culture...Its jackbooted baboons have gradually exterminated the really talented authors, the special individual, the fragile genius. One of the saddest cases is perhaps that of Osip Mandelshtam - a wonderful poet, the greatest poet among those thriving to survive in Russia under the Soviets - whom that brutal and imbecile administration persecuted and finally drove to death in a remote concentration camp. The poems he heroically kept composing until madness eclipsed his limpid gifits are admirable specimens of a human mind at its deepest and highest. Reading them enchances one's healthy contempt for Soviet ferocity" (V,58)
"There were a few writers who discovered that if they chose certain plots...they could get away... Ilf and Petrov, two wonderfully gidted writers, decided that if they had a rascal adventurer...whatever they wrote about his adventures could not be criticized from a political point of view...any picaresque charater - could not be accused either of being a bad Communist or not being a good Communist... The poets had a parallel system...if they stuck to the garden...then yhey were safe. Zabolotski found a third method of writing...All these people were enormously gifted but the soviet regime finally caught up with them and they disappeared, one by one, in nameless camps."(V, 87/88)
[...] I read (Blok and Mendelshtam) in my boyhood...I have remained passionately fond of Blok's lyrics. His long pieces are weak...As to Mandelshtam, I also knew him by heart, but he gave me a less fervent pleasure. Today, through the prism of a tragic fate, his poetry seems greater than it actually is... (V.97)
JM: I copied down several Nabokov's "Strong Opinions" (YES! Stan. How else can we think if not by elaborating over our's and another's true opinions?) I suggest we depart from factual wordings, not from distorted recollections, lest we overween...
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C.Kunin: Was Pasternak really that much more a novelist of ideas (which was what VN purported to despise about him, and others) than was Tolstoy? ... Did Nabokov ever attack the truly ridiculous ideas of Tolstoy? It seems to me possible that there is some kind of suppression of guilt feelings going on in some of VN's more outrageous attitudes to Soviet writers.
V.Nabokov (Strong Opinions) "I differ from Joseph Conradically...Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, a person called Tagore, another called Maxim Gorky, a third called Romain Rolland, used to be accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called 'great books'. That, for instante, Mann's asinine "Death in Venice" or Pasternak's melodramatic and vively written "Zhivago" or Faulkner's corncobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces," or at least what journalists call "great books," is to me an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair."(Vintage,57)
"In the first years after the Bolshevik revolution..one could still distinguish, through the dreadful platitudes of Soviet propaganda the dying voice of an earlier culture...Its jackbooted baboons have gradually exterminated the really talented authors, the special individual, the fragile genius. One of the saddest cases is perhaps that of Osip Mandelshtam - a wonderful poet, the greatest poet among those thriving to survive in Russia under the Soviets - whom that brutal and imbecile administration persecuted and finally drove to death in a remote concentration camp. The poems he heroically kept composing until madness eclipsed his limpid gifits are admirable specimens of a human mind at its deepest and highest. Reading them enchances one's healthy contempt for Soviet ferocity" (V,58)
"There were a few writers who discovered that if they chose certain plots...they could get away... Ilf and Petrov, two wonderfully gidted writers, decided that if they had a rascal adventurer...whatever they wrote about his adventures could not be criticized from a political point of view...any picaresque charater - could not be accused either of being a bad Communist or not being a good Communist... The poets had a parallel system...if they stuck to the garden...then yhey were safe. Zabolotski found a third method of writing...All these people were enormously gifted but the soviet regime finally caught up with them and they disappeared, one by one, in nameless camps."(V, 87/88)
[...] I read (Blok and Mendelshtam) in my boyhood...I have remained passionately fond of Blok's lyrics. His long pieces are weak...As to Mandelshtam, I also knew him by heart, but he gave me a less fervent pleasure. Today, through the prism of a tragic fate, his poetry seems greater than it actually is... (V.97)
JM: I copied down several Nabokov's "Strong Opinions" (YES! Stan. How else can we think if not by elaborating over our's and another's true opinions?) I suggest we depart from factual wordings, not from distorted recollections, lest we overween...
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/