Nabokov's Old Soundbites Still Bite

For some chinwag, nobody does it with aplomb than Nabokov. In a 1965 Playboy interview, his charitable comments on fellow Russian Dostoevsky and novelists Hemingway and Conrad is one for summit negotiations.

Q: Dostoevski, who dealt with themes accepted by most readers as universal in both scope and significance, is considered one of the world's great authors. Yet you have described him as "a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. "Why?

Nabokov: Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment-- by this reader anyway.

A slapdash comedian? Several chapters of Crime and Punishment and I do believe that the punishment in the title is more of a caveat. Sorry.

Q: Is it true that you have called Hemingway and Conrad"writers of books for boys"?

Nabokov: That's exactly what they are. Hemingway is certainly the better of the two; he has at least a voice of his own and is responsible for that delightful, highly artistic short story,"The Killers." And the description of the iridescent fish and rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is superb. But I cannot abide Conrad's souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches. In neither of those two writers can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile,and the same can be said of some other beloved authors, the pets of the common room, the consolation and support of graduate students, such as-- but some are still alive, and I hate to hurt living old boys while the dead ones are not yet buried.

Souvenir-shop style? Pets of the common room? I cannot smirk at such snobbery.

Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," from relative academic obscurity was embraced by the academic brigade when the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe blasted Conrad as a "bloody racist." Then came the discourses and the dissertations.

I wonder who the other "beloved authors" are and the dead ones not yet buried Nabokov is alluding to. Oh, writers and their catfights, so delectable on a humid day.

(Caricature from The New Yorker)