Thread 24573742

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

Faulkner:
>Writer of corncobby chronicles. To consider them masterpieces is an absurd delusion. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me.

Eliot:
>Now, having shaken off that stupor, I find the latter anagrimes with “Proust” while “T. S. Eliot” goes well with “toilets.”

Dostoevsky:
>Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. Some of his scenes are extraordinarily amusing. Nobody takes his reactionary journalism seriously.

Borges:
>At first Véra and I were delighted by reading him. We felt we were on a portico, but we have learned that there was no house.

Freud:
>A figure of fun. Loathe him. Vile deceit. Freudian interpretation of dreams is charlatanic, and satanic, nonsense.
>Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.

James:
>I have read (or rather reread) 'What Maisie Knew.' It is terrible. Perhaps there is some other Henry James and I am continuously hitting upon the wrong one?
>I read 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.
>He writes with a very sharp nib and the ink is very pale and there is very little of it in his inkpot . . . The style is artistic but it is not the style of an artist . . . Henry James is definitely for non-smokers. He has charm (as the weak blond prose of Turgenev has), but that’s about all.


Gogol:
>Nobody takes his mystical didacticism seriously. At his worst, as in his Ukrainian stuff, he is a worthless writer; at his best, he is incomparable and inimitable. Loathe his moralistic slant, am depressed and puzzled by his inability to describe young women, deplore his obsession with religion.

>>24573742 (OP)
These aren’t even good criticisms. He’s just a stuck up pseud cunt

>>24573785
>muh good criticism
He wasn't posting on Reddit, faggot. He's correct about most of these, especially James and Borges. Overrated frauds.

Faulkner is the kind of writer one would imagine someone like Nabokov would enjoy reading. Bit weird.

Damn what a sourpuss. He should lighten up a little

>>24573742 (OP)
the only ones who are allowed to drop one sentence bombs are the frogs

>>24573797
He’s always correct in his critical opinions, but the odd thing is that he was such a florid pseud himself. Like how does someone who knows that Tolstoy is God end up writing like Nabokov?
I feel like if he were able to be as objective about himself he’d say something like “Puffed up. Nonsensical. A putrid ‘prose artist’. Means nothing to me.”

>>24573742 (OP)
>something about bells, balls and bulls
>“T. S. Eliot” goes well with “toilets.”
>We felt we were on a portico, but we have learned that there was no house.
>Perhaps there is some other Henry James and I am continuously hitting upon the wrong one?
Brutal. He took no prisoners.

>>24573742 (OP)
The Borges one in conjunction with his earlier praise of Borges, gives off the impression that he initially liked him but then pretended not to when his wife told him she thought Borges was mediocre. Anyone else get that impression?

>>24573874
Not necessarily, it sometimes happens with writers, especially short story writers, that the first impression really wows you because you expect even more and what you’ve already gotten was so good. Then the more you read of them you realize that’s all there is, and it’s a lot less impressive. That’s their gimmick. That’s what Nabokov experienced with Borges.

>>24573869
He was self-aware about his limitations as an artist.

>>24573874
I think he liked him at first and then saw that there was nothing really there past a few good stories.

>>24573881
>>24573918
It’s more to me that in the initial quote he doesn’t mention Vera yet he does in the second quote. Idk

>Vera and I thought it over and we dislike him

>>24573742 (OP)
Okay, now what are some of his commendations?

>>24573924
Jane Austen, Edgar Allen Poe, Tolstoy, Proust but only first three books, Metamorphosis of Kafka, Ulysses, Bergson’s philosophy essays

>>24573924
He worshipped Dickens and Tolstoy mainly

>>24573742 (OP)
Although I hold Nabokov in exceeding esteem as a novelist, his critical opinions seem to be limited to pejorative hodgepodge with no connotation of rigor. Its difficult for him (and perhaps even inconsistent) to say that the object of literature is the generation of aesthetic bliss while also disparaging other novelists, it would just mean that he does not prefer to read them or that they dont appeal to him.

>>24573923
One quote comes from a letter while the other one comes from an interview with his wife present. They were impressed and then found his work shallow. Not sure why that's controversial.

>>24573975
Borges is pretty lame. Yeah.

Pic related. He is the redditor’s favorite

>>24573924
Shakespeare, Joyce, Carroll, Poe, Tolstoy, Wells, Bely, Kafka.

>>24573983
Oh and Dickens, like the other guy said.

>>24573742 (OP)
He is so sassy.

>Rates Joyce
And into the trash he goes

>>24574088
>Filtered by Joyce
Many such cases.

>>24573742 (OP)
>Like many former teenagers, I was once a great admirer of Nabokov. No twentieth-century novelist, with the possible exception of Thomas Wolfe, comes closer to a fifteen-year-old’s idea of a great man of letters. He used alliteration, you see, and knew lots of fancy synonyms for “green.” He lived in luxury hotels and claimed to have a condition (apparently shared with Wagner, Madame Blavatsky, and Kanye West) which allowed him to experience letters as colors—or was it the other way around? He also hated Camus, Faulkner, “Mr. Pound, that total fake,” and many other writers I instinctively despised.

>That was quand j’etais enfant (as the man himself might have put it). By my mid-twenties I found the whole V.N. ethos—seaside resorts, white suits, pink champagne, thin black moustaches, cabinets particulier—irredeemably seedy. Now the idea of reading Lolita in public brings acute feelings of anxiety, and whenever I see that old Vintage paperback (with its zoomed-in photograph of what are hopefully adult female lips) covering someone’s face in a park bench or on airplane, I get a strong whiff of second-hand embarrassment. “No extract,” Kingsley Amis complained in his review, “could do justice to the sustained din of pun, allusion, neologism, alliteration, cynghanedd, apostrophe, parenthesis, rhetorical question, French, Latin, anent, perchance, would fain, for the nonce.” Evelyn Waugh spoke for millions of Book of the Month Club readers when he told Nancy Mitford that he had not enjoyed the novel “except as smut.” (He was distinctly less impressed with the “very high-brow allusions,” which he believed had been inserted exclusively for the American edition.) I don’t think it’s absurd to suggest that if it had not become a bestseller, Nabokov might have been one of those curious minor writers occasionally dug up by the editors of New York Review Classics.

>Most of the books certainly read that way now, especially the Russian ones. If you came across The Defense in a second-hand book shop without its title page, you would think you had stumbled upon a somewhat interesting pastiche of Joyce’s Portrait and wonder whether you should email the Dalkey Archive Press. Ditto Invitation to a Beheading, which, despite the author’s protests that he had not then read Kafka, is a diverting retread of The Trial. (He also claimed not to have encountered T.S. Eliot until the Forties, a lunatic assertion that does not survive even a surface-level reading of the early poems, much less the knowledge that he was at Cambridge from 1919 until 1922.) Only in The Gift, with its brilliant interposed Life of Chernyshevsky and rather jolly O. Henry-like ending, do you get the sense that you are dealing with something that resembles a major talent.

>>24573866
May everyone else sperg in paragraphs

>>24573874
I think he became aware that Borges disliked Nabokov's work

>>24574563
Borges never read Nabokov but he defended Lolita against the censorship in his country.
>I have not read Nabokov's [Lolita] and I do not intend to read it, since the length of the novel genre does not match either the darkness of my eyes or the brevity of human life.
He also didn't finish Ulysses. In general, he was a lazy reader of novels.

>>24573742 (OP)
>puzzled by his inability to describe young women
based

>>24574574
when I say I don't want to read these slogs people call me a retard but when borges does it it's cool. such bs.

>>24574574
read or write. that is the question

>>24574580
He has a pretext. He was old, blind and had the lazy South American thing going for him.

>>24573742 (OP)
i wish i was well read enough to know what he means with some of these

>>24574574
He did read it and said something to the like : Now everyone will think that this is the only way to write.

He didn't like the book

>>24573742 (OP)
>Perhaps there is some other Henry James and I am continuously hitting upon the wrong one?
did he just admit to continuously hitting on men?

>>24574609
He didn't read it. His friend read to him the first few pages and that's it. Then the friend said:
>It must be very harmful to a writer. One realizes that it is impossible to write any other way.
That's the opposite of disliking it.

It's funny that Nabokov called Dostoevsky a reactionary when Nabokov was very much a reactionary as well.

>>24574746
how was Nabokov a reactionary?

>>24573874
His wife cheated on him so that's that...

>>24575374
Most wives who are hot do. That’s why the term is literally “hot wife”. It’s the price you pay to not be married to a cinnamon roll.

Faulkner clears.

>>24575665
Nabokov's wife was anything but hot and his son was an actual faggot

You MUST pic ONE author and hate all others!
Dumb fucking niggers.

>>24575684
Of course his son was gay. Nabokov was probably raping him his entire childhood.

>>24575684
An interviewer described her as “strikingly beautiful”
Remember if you’re looking at old photos of her, the standards of the time were different. Women are basically a different species now compared to the frumps they used to be.

>>24575745
She's ugly as fuck dude.

>>24573797
If these reviews contained moral panic they would fit right in on reddit.

>>24575825
Mrs Schnoz-owitz was a member of the tribe QED.

>>24573742 (OP)
Fucking based...

>>24575374
kek you faggots have tried every angle and still fail.

>>24575825
she's already old there

>>24576032
She's thirty-two in that picture.

>>24573742 (OP)
>et the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.
This one is actually pretty based.

>>24574412
you can appreciate nabokov's relentless cooking better when you contrast it with this pansy babble

>>24575683
The foreign snob cannot comprehend the true greatness of the corncob chad

>>24573742 (OP)
>these guys suck! now read my book about touching little girls

>>24574579
those enigmas, they never get old, don't they ёб твoю мaть

>>24573742 (OP)
my sides
>We felt we were on a portico, but we have learned that there was no house
borgesisters on the suicide watch

>>24573742 (OP)
>A figure of fun. Loathe him. Vile deceit. Freudian interpretation of dreams is charlatanic, and satanic, nonsense.
After Pale Fire, I didn't think I could like this man any more. That's my GOAT right there

>>24573742 (OP)
If you are alluding to Dostoevsky’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigamarole. 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. Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity – all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of ”sinning their way to Jesus” or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, ”spilling Jesus all over the place." Crime and Punishment’s plot did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. 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. Dostoyevsky seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.

>>24573742 (OP)
Nabokov seems a little too preoccupied with not being "vulgar"

>>24574412
>surface level things that don't even appear often as his "ethos"
>leaving any mention of his inventiveness to quotes by others
average nabby denouncer

>>24579029
he means something like dull and trite. there are too many passages in ada about anal sex and shitting for him to mean the same thing we do by vulgar.