The Meanest Things Vladimir Nabokov Said About Other Writers

Vladimir Nabokov was an unusually opinionated man—particularly when it came to literature. His own, primarily—when asked about the function of his editor, he sniffed, “By ‘editor’ I suppose you mean proofreader”—but as a close second (what else could it be): everybody else’s. In interviews, he seemed to delight in airing his grievances about other writers’ work, especially when he considered them unfairly beloved by the public.

Reading his complaints half a century later, I have to say, I delight in them too. At a time when the literary world seems determined to swear that every book is Good because it is a Book, Nabokov’s outspoken anti-book opinions feel almost ecstatically transgressive. Well, I suppose no one was around to drag him on Twitter for daring to speak his mind; he had no real fears that a bad review would hang around to haunt his career or block him from getting a coveted blurb. And as far as feuds go, though Nabokov certainly had his own legendary battle, I think of him as being so haughty and aggressively dignified that I imagine his body would have actually repelled the spit of any disgruntled, badly reviewed writer who might have chosen to approach him.

Still, there was some contemporaneous pearl-clutching at Nabokov’s loose tongue. In a 1966 essay responding to his critics, chiefly his ex-best friend Edmund Wilson (alluded to above), Nabokov wrote:

Mr. Wilson is horrified by my “instinct to take digs at great reputations.” Well, it cannot be helped; Mr. Wilson must accept my instinct, and wait for the next crash. I refuse to be guided and controlled by a communion of established views and academic traditions, as he wants me to be. What right has he to prevent me from finding mediocre and overrated people like Balzac, Dostoevski, Sainte-Beuve, or Stendhal, the pet of all those who like their French plain? . . . If I am allowed to display my very special and very subjective admiration for Pushkin, Browning, Krylov, Chateaubriand, Griboedov, Senancour, Küchelbecker, Keats, Hodasevich, to name only a few of those I praise in my notes, I should be also allowed to bolster and circumscribe that praise by pointing out to the reader my favorite bogeys and shams in the hall of false fame.

Hear, hear.

Now, I’m not advocating rudeness for its own sake, and Nabokov could be weirdly vindictive (see his anti-Pasternak campaign, among other things—on the other hand, when an interviewer asked him about the best thing one can do in life, he said: “to be kind, to be proud, to be fearless.”); nor do I think he is actually right in all of the below. I just find his frankness refreshing and his insults remarkably well-crafted. It is Nabokov, after all. So to that end, below are some of Nabokov’s very best insults, slung at other famous writers and their books.

On Bertolt Brecht, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, and Ezra Pound:

Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as “great literature” by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley’s copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced Dr. Schweitzer in some homes.

–from Nabokov’s 1967 interview in The Paris Review

On T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (again):

I was ever exposed in the twenties and thirties, as so many of my coevals have been, to the poetry of the not quite first-rate Eliot and of definitely second-rate Pound. I read them late in the season, around 1945, in the guest room of an American friend’s house, and not only remained completely indifferent to them, but could not understand why anybody should bother about them. But I suppose that they preserve some sentimental value for such readers as discovered them at an earlier age than I did.

–from Nabokov’s 1964 interview in Playboy, as reprinted in Strong Opinions

On Thomas Mann, Boris Pasternak, and William Faulkner:

That, for instance, Mann’s asinine Death in Venice or Pasternak’s melodramatic and vilely written Zhivago or Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles can be considered “masterpieces,” or at least what journalists call “great books,” is to me an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair.

–from a 1965 interview with Robert Hughes, as reprinted in Strong Opinions

On W.H. Auden, or worse, Robert Lowell: 

I do not parody Mr. [W. H.] Auden anywhere in Ada. I’m not sufficiently familiar with his poetry for that. I do know, however, a few of his translations—and deplore the blunders he so lightheartedly permits himself. Robert Lowell, of course, is the greater offender.

–from a 1969 interview with James Mossman, as reprinted in Strong Opinions

On Nikolai Gogol:

I was careful not to learn anything from him. As a teacher, he is dubious and dangerous. At his worst, as in his Ukrainian stuff, he is a worthless writer; at his best, he is incomparable and inimitable.

–from Nabokov’s 1967 interview in The Paris Review

On Ernest Hemingway:

As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 40s, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

–from a 1967 interview with Alfred Appel Jr., as reprinted in Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov

On Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway (again):

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 clichés. 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.

–from Nabokov’s 1964 interview in Playboy, as reprinted in Strong Opinions

On Fyodor Dostoevsky:

Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky 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.

–from Nabokov’s 1964 interview in Playboy, as reprinted in Strong Opinions

I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigmarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search.

–from a 1969 interview with James Mossman, as reprinted in Strong Opinions

On Marcel Proust (whose work he actually loved) and T. S. Eliot:

At first my brain was somewhat numbed
by your somnambulistic numbers, Edmund.
Now, having shaken off that stupor,
I find the latter anagrimes with “Proust”
while “T. S. Eliot”
goes well with “toilets.”

–from a poem written in a 1948 letter to Edmund Wilson

On Sigmund Freud:

Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind? I may have aired this before but I’d like to repeat that I detest not one but four doctors: Dr. Freud, Dr. Zhivago, Dr. Schweitzer, and Dr. Castro. Of course, the first takes the fig, as the fellows say in the dissecting-room. I’ve no intention to dream the drab middle-class dreams of an Austrian crank with a shabby umbrella. . . . The Freudian racket looks to me as much of a farce as the jumbo thingum of polished wood with a polished hole in the middle which doesn’t represent anything except the gaping face of the Philistine who is told it is a great sculpture produced by the greatest living caveman.

–from a 1968 interview with Nicholas Garnham, as reprinted in Strong Opinions

On Henry James:

I have not read a book (save for a collection of Henry James’ short stories—miserable stuff, a complete fake, you ought to debunk that pale porpoise and his plush vulgarities some day) nor written a word since I left Cambridge.

–from a 1952 letter to Edmund Wilson