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.

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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.

Light and Dark

I'm still trying to sort out the ending. The story had to end tragically but was surprised that Rogozhin actually sought forgiveness in Myshkin after what he had done to Nastya, although I think that Dostoevsky intended the two to be read as one, along similar lines as The Double . He kept Rogozhin a shadowy figure throughout the novel, ever lurking in the dark of the Prince's soul. Try as he might, Prince Myshkin could not alter events and thus the fantasy world he had lived in upon returning to Russia crumbled before his eyes, leaving him at a total loss as how to reconcile himself with it. Once again, Dostoevsky plumbs great depths of the human soul. This is a psychological drama told in theatrical terms, perfectly suited for the stage. Characters appear and disappear as if moving from the shadows of the stage. I can see the "green bench" as the central stage piece. In the final part, one gets the sense that Lebedev is orchestrating events, and may even

The Morning of Our Motherland

I was watching a History channel special on Socialist Realism art of the Soviet Union and this was one of the grand canvases that is now stuffed away in the Tretyakov State Gallery . The painter was Fyodor Shurpin and he had a wonderful eye for detail, right down to the secret service black car on the road to Stalin's right. To the left, one sees a row of combines turning over the field of golden wheat, which became symbolic of Stalin's Soviet Union. Утро нашей Родины is from 1949, with Stalin radiating a post-war confidence. It is also known as Dawn of our Fatherland and other titles. Shurpin was one of the better artists to carry over from the pre-war years. The narrator pointed out how socialist realist art changed dramatically as a result of the war, becoming much more static and propagandist in appearance. He pointed to two stops along the Moscow subway as an example of this divide. Here, Shurpin essentially transposes Stalin for an earlier "Mother"

Chekhov's Gun

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