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Fw: VN and Communist sympathizers.
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----- Original Message -----
From: nabokov
To: 'D. Barton Johnson'
Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2003 8:22 AM
Subject: VN and Communist sympathizers.
Dear Don (please post),
"Charitable"? "Lapses"? By using these patronizing terms in your appraisal of my father's expression of his views you are drawing me into a discussion that we had perhaps best continue in another venue. Politics, when present in art and scholarship, at best decry the senseless cruelty of vile regimes, and at worst glorify them. In certain cases Nabokov expressed his "principled distaste" for tyranny through his art (or do you consider Invitation to a Beheading, or Bend Sinister, or, say, "Cloud, Castle, Lake" "lapses" requiring "charity"?). Rest assured that Nabokov did not denounce certain leftish colleagues at Cornell to the agencies investigating un-American activities, as a scoundrel named Olshansky has alleged. But when asked for his assessment of film star Chaplin, Harvard professor Jakobson, sacred cow of French letters Sartre et al., all of whom performed amid comfort and liberty while extolling a regime of censorship and terror, he rightly expressed his "principled distaste" for their hypocrisy. Of course it is hard to explain certain things to the multitudes who have for years undergone a subtle but constant leftist barrage through entertainment, the media, and academe, because that barrage itself will have conditioned their responses. You, Don, have a gentle, conciliatory dispostion. Perhaps, however, it has been subliminally influenced not only by the gentle climate in which you live, but also by your proximity to the Berkeley academic climate and such institutions as the Ruckus Society, a training camp for destabilizing demonstrators of various sub-stripes. Carolyn Kunin, even though she belongs to a younger generation, is right when she recommends Martin Amis's Koba the Dread. Objectively educated people of all generations should understand that whitewashing Communism falls in more or less the same moral category as questioning the veracity of the Holocaust.
Best,
Dmitri
----- Original Message -----
From: nabokov
To: 'D. Barton Johnson'
Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2003 8:22 AM
Subject: VN and Communist sympathizers.
Dear Don (please post),
"Charitable"? "Lapses"? By using these patronizing terms in your appraisal of my father's expression of his views you are drawing me into a discussion that we had perhaps best continue in another venue. Politics, when present in art and scholarship, at best decry the senseless cruelty of vile regimes, and at worst glorify them. In certain cases Nabokov expressed his "principled distaste" for tyranny through his art (or do you consider Invitation to a Beheading, or Bend Sinister, or, say, "Cloud, Castle, Lake" "lapses" requiring "charity"?). Rest assured that Nabokov did not denounce certain leftish colleagues at Cornell to the agencies investigating un-American activities, as a scoundrel named Olshansky has alleged. But when asked for his assessment of film star Chaplin, Harvard professor Jakobson, sacred cow of French letters Sartre et al., all of whom performed amid comfort and liberty while extolling a regime of censorship and terror, he rightly expressed his "principled distaste" for their hypocrisy. Of course it is hard to explain certain things to the multitudes who have for years undergone a subtle but constant leftist barrage through entertainment, the media, and academe, because that barrage itself will have conditioned their responses. You, Don, have a gentle, conciliatory dispostion. Perhaps, however, it has been subliminally influenced not only by the gentle climate in which you live, but also by your proximity to the Berkeley academic climate and such institutions as the Ruckus Society, a training camp for destabilizing demonstrators of various sub-stripes. Carolyn Kunin, even though she belongs to a younger generation, is right when she recommends Martin Amis's Koba the Dread. Objectively educated people of all generations should understand that whitewashing Communism falls in more or less the same moral category as questioning the veracity of the Holocaust.
Best,
Dmitri