Norman Page - Vladimir Nabokov : The Critical Heritage

VLADIMIR NABOKOV: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES

General Editor: B. C. Southam

The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the formation of critical attitudes to the writers work and its place within a literary tradition.

The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentary material, such as letters and diaries.

Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in order to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writers death.

First published in 1982

Reprinted in 1997, 2000 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park,

Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

&

711 Third Avenue,

New York, NY 10017

Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

First issued in paperback 2013

Compilation, introduction, notes and index 1982 Norman Page

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-415-15916-6 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-415-84966-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-136-21004-4 (ePub)

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

General Editors Preface

The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries is evidence of considerable value to the student of literature. On one side we learn a great deal about the state of criticism at large and in particular about the development of critical attitudes towards a single writer; at the same time, through private comments in letters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insight upon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the period. Evidence of this kind helps us to understand the writers historical situation, the nature of his immediate reading-public, and his response to these pressures.

The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage Series present a record of this early criticism. Clearly, for many of the highly productive and lengthily reviewed nineteenth and twentieth-century writers, there exists an enormous body of material; and in these cases the volume editors have made a selection of the most important views, significant for their intrinsic critical worth or for their representative quality perhaps even registering incomprehension!

For earlier writers, notably pre-eighteenth century, the materials are much scarcer and the historical period has been extended, sometimes far beyond the writers lifetime, in order to show the inception and growth of critical views which were initially slow to appear.

In each volume the documents are headed by an Introduction, discussing the material assembled and relating the early stages of the authors reception to what we have come to identify as the critical tradition. The volumes will make available much material which would otherwise be difficult of access and it is hoped that the modern reader will be thereby helped towards an informed understanding of the ways in which literature has been read and judged.

B.C.S.

To Edward and Marian Griew

Every effort has been made to locate copyright holders, but the editor and publishers regret that it has proved impossible to trace some of them. We wish to thank the following for permission to reprint copyright material: Ardis Publishers for No. 2; Art International for No. 61; Georges Borchardt, Inc., for No. 31, from The Reporter ( 1962); Brigid Brophy for No. 68 ( Brigid Brophy 1972); the Daily Telegraph for Nos 27 and 32; Denis Donoghue for No. 58; Encounter for Nos 25, 43 and 70; the Guardian for No. 36; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., for No. 16, from Speaking of Literature and Society by Lionel Trilling (Copyright 1980 by Diana Trilling and James Trilling); The Hudson Review for No. 55, reprinted by permission from The Hudson Review, Vol. XIX, No. 3 (Autumn, 1966) (Copyright 1966 by The Hudson Review, Inc.); The Kenyon Review for Nos 15 and 19 (Copyright 1957 by Kenyon College); Frank Kermode for No. 12; The Nation (New York) for No. 50; The New Republic for Nos 8, 23, 29, 38 and 56 ( 1947, 1959, 1962, 1964, 1966 The New Republic, Inc.); the New Statesman for Nos 10, 18, 20, 34, 40, 44, 49, 57, 73 and 75; The New York Review of Books for No. 47 (reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books. Copyright 1965 Nyrev, Inc.); The New York Review of Books for No. 62 (reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books. Copyright 1969 Nyrev, Inc.); The New York Times for Nos 5, 35. 39 and 72 ( 1942, 1963, 1964, 1974 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission); The New Yorker for No. 37 (Reprinted by permission; 1964 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.); Partisan Review and John Hollander for No. 13 ( 1956 by Partisan Review, Inc.); Partisan Review and Dwight Macdonald for No. 30 ( 1962 by Partisan Review. Inc.): Paul Pickrel for No. 22. from Harpers Magazine ( Paul Pickrel 1959); Poetry for No. 46 (Copyright 1965 by The Modern Poetry Association); Punch for No. 11; Saturday Review for Nos 9, 59 and 69 (Copyright 1947, 1969, 1973 by Saturday Review. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission); Slavonic and East European Review for No. 1; the Spectator for Nos 7, 17, 21, 41, 45 and 53; Times Newspapers Ltd for Nos 24, 28, 48, 52, 64 and 67 from the Times Literary Supplement and No. 74 from The Times; Stephen Wall for No. 42; Weiden-feld & Nicolson Ltd, William Morrow & Co., Inc., and Robert Alter for No. 63, from Nabokov: A Tribute, ed. Peter Quennell (Copyright 1979 by George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd); The Yale Review for Nos 60 and 66 (Copyright 1969, 1971 by Yale University); the Yorkshire Post for Nos 26 and 33.

I

Nabokovs biography of Gogol, the Russian writer with whom he has been most often compared, begins with the subjects death and ends with his birth; and the critical reception of Nabokovs work is infected by something of the same topsy-turvy quality. This is partly because, although his literary activity covered some sixty years, fame came to him very late. But in order fully to explain how it came about that reviewers in the English-speaking world were confronted by some of his early novels only after some of the later novels had been widely read and discussed, it will be necessary to sketch the highly unusual pattern of his career.

At home in both Russian and English from his earliest years, Nabokov began writing in Russian very young; and a volume of his poems was privately printed when he was seventeen. This elicited his first review: a journalist who had reason to be grateful to my father wrote an impossibly enthusiastic piece about me. The review was never published but, according to the account in Nabokovs autobiography, it had a far-reaching effect upon his attitude to his critics:

The whole business cured me permanently of all interest in literary fame and was probably the cause of that almost pathological and not always justified indifference to reviews which in later years deprived me of the emotions most authors are said to experience. (Speak, Memory 1967, 2389)