Bedside or Wastebasket

As Edmund Wilson found out, it is best not to try to predict Nabokov's literary tastes when he lent him a review copy of Faulkner's Light of August thinking Vladimir would appreciate it as much as he did. Nabokov dismissed this work like he did all of Faulkner's work as trite and tedious romances.

Nabokov was infamous for dismissing canonical authors such as Dostoevsky and Henry James and Albert Camus. He had no soft spot for the much revered Cervantes either, calling Don Quixote "a cruel and crude book," although he doesn't deny the influence it had on Russian writers of the 19th century. He just felt that his dear Pushkin and Lermontov greatly rose above it in their poems and stories.

I was a bit surprised to see he so disliked Henry James. Portrait of a Lady struck me as the type of novel that might appeal to him, as James rises above the social milieu of the time to create a very striking portrait of Isabel Archer, and James has a wonderful sense of time and space, which Nabokov liked so much about Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

Of course, there were many novelists he did like. John Updike and J.D. Salinger both received high marks. He liked Melville and had a soft spot for H.G. Wells. He also singled out great works of authors while he panned others. Such was the case with James Joyce, praising Ulysses but blasting Finnegan's Wake. Likewise with Gogol, whenever he displayed his strong nationalist bent in stories like Taras Bulba, while regarding Dead Souls as one of the great Russian novels, and even speaking highly of Guerney's English translation, which was exceedingly rare.

For Nabokov it was a love/hate relationship with novels. It was either by his bedside or in the wastebasket, as far as he was concerned. There was no in between.

Comments

Ward No. 6

Ward No. 6 is a short story written by Chekhov in 1892. It has appeared in various collections of Chekhov short stories, including The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories translated by Constance Garnett in 1921. In this story, Chekhov explores the inner working of a run-down lunatic asylum in a provincial town. He introduces the readers to a coarse porter who speaks mostly with his fists, various patients, a doctor who presides over this ward, and expresses his thoughts with a local postmaster. It was recently made into a movie , featuring Vladimir Ilyin. Here's a clip . There's also this very recent short film (30 min.) by Suzana Purkovic, with English subtitles.

Myshkin's dilemna

Wrapped up Part II the other night and have to say that Dostoevsky certainly has a comic's eye, although one senses the potentially tragic undertones. For Dostoevsky the aristocracy seems to be one largely made up of capricious souls more obsessed with good manners than any profound sense of their being. This is particularly true for the Epanchins, who comically wrestle with their emotions in one scene after another as he places them in very odd and unnerving situations that test the limits of poor Lizaveta Prokofyevna's endurance. Of her daughters, Aglaya, is the most interesting. A real beauty much along the same lines as Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov, who likewise seems to have a hold on Prince Myshkin's emotional strings. Part II ended with Lizaveta demanding to know the extent of the Prince's interests in her youngest daughter. The Prince insisted his feelings were Platonic, but one senses there is more to be said on the matter in later chapters. ...

Roadside Picnic: Life inside the Zone

If you're like me and wondered what the hell Stalker was all about, I would suggest reading Roadside Picnic , the book on which it was nominally based. Tarkovsky took his idea from the character, Redrick Schuhart, a laboratory assistant and Harmont Branch of the International Institute of Extraterrestrial Cultures, leaving the rest up to the imagination. The names were changed to protect the innocent. While Tarkovsky chose to shroud the story in mystery, the Strugatsky Brothers lay it out pretty clearly in their science fiction classic. Redrick, the Stalker, has gone into the zone countless times but each time represents a new set of challenges, especially with the Harmont Branch cracking down on the plundering of alien objects left behind by a visitation to a small rural town in Canada. I suppose setting the story in a place outside Russia, allowed the Strugatsky brothers more room to explore new ideas and avoid heavy censhorship, but according to Boris in t...

Chekhov's Gun

Search This Blog