Some objections to Nabokov

 

As is well known, Nabokov had contempt for Dostoevsky. I’ve long regarded that as the bad taste of good taste – of having too strong a taste for a certain kind of novel and poem that cages you into a certain school or style. Nabokov’s father, apparently, had the bad taste to like Balzac, for whose “trashy” books, of course, Nabokov has a low opinion.

This sectarian tendency in Nabokov puts me out of sorts with him. He has, to my mind, a second rate critical intelligence, which makes me weary of his novels and their too easy cruelties.

Recently, though, I’ve been thinking that perhaps Nabokov, living in Germany in the 20s and 30s, thought so badly of Dostoevsky because his vilest idea – his permanent hatred of Jews – was not only appreciated by the ultra-right, but was an inspiration for Nazis like Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg, who was hung at the end of the war, was a Baltic German, one of a core group that migrated to the Nazis in the early twenties. Rosenberg was the official “theorist” of Naziism, and Dostoevsky was a convenient great name to give an honorable lineage to the murderous hatred of Jews.

Nabokov never discusses Dostoevsky in terms of this heritage. It would, of course, violate his notion of the aesthetic to allow something this political to impinge on opinion of a novel. Yet there is something quite comic about the way Nabokov went around dismissing whole swathes of literature, from Balzac to Thomas Mann, something that has a motive above that of his dandyism. Mann, of course, draws a lot from Dostoevsky. All of German literature did.

I wonder about that Nabokovian finickiness.