Rate Nabokov's taste in writers:
Genius:
William Shakespeare: “the finest verbal texture ever”
Alexander Pushkin: an absolute genius
John Milton: an absolute genius
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Kerenin supreme masterpiece of 19th-century prose
James Joyce: Ulysses first place masterpiece of 20th-century prose
Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis 2nd place
Andrei Bely: St Petersburg, 3rd
Marcel Proust: First half of ‘fairy tale’ In Search of Lost Time Vol 1, 4th
Great:
Charles Dickens
Jane Austen
Anton Chekhov: talent, but not genius–‘talant’ in Russian is more precise.
Nikolai Gogal: both dire and brilliant in his writings
First rate:
Herman Melville: adore him, though quite a strange fellow, would have loved to see him
H.G. Wells: undervalued and by far the better Victorian writer than his contemporaries
Gustave Flaubert: a favourite since young
John Updike: one of the best talents of recent years by far
J.D Salinger: one of the best talents of recent years by far
Jorge Luis Borges: spacious labyrinths and infinite talent
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Samuel Beckett: writer of lovely novellas and wretched plays
John Barth: a skilled and talented writer, and friend
Henri Bergson: a favourite since young
Lewis Carroll: intriguing and talented weirdo
Norman Douglas: great love of boyhood and still
Ralph Waldo Emerson: for the poetry
Osip Mandelshtam: a better Soviet writer
Alexander Blok: the best Soviet writer
Good but immature:
Edgar Allen Poe: enchanted but disillusioned by, would enjoy watching his bizarre wedding
Ernest Hemingway: writer for books for boys but has his moments
Joseph Conrad: a worse writer for books for boys, utterly lost charm now
G.K Chesterton
Arthur Conan Doyle
Rudyard Kipling
Oscar Wilde: a rank moralist
Rupert Brooke
(continued in the next post)
>(continued)
Second rate to plain awful:
T.S Eliot: not quite first rate, certainly overvalued
Louis-Ferdinand Celine: appears good but is untamed
Sigmund Freud: ridiculous
Ezra Pound: ridiculous
Brecht, Bertolt: nonentity
Somerset Maugham: overdone sensational travel stories
William Faulkner: ridiculous
Albert Camus: his writing is nothing
John Galsworthy: mediocrity
Fyodor Dostoevsky: messy sensationalist
Thomas Mann: silly and mad about perineums
Henry James: not observant enough and a tad arcane
Jean Paul Sartre: a good trier but tired failure, of “cafe philosophy”
E.M. Forster: read one book and hated it
D.H Lawrence; silly, immature, cliché
Cervantes: Don Quixote, a bad old book
Saul Bellow “a laughable mediocrity”
Boris Pasternak
Thedore Dreiser
Maxim Gorky
Romain Holland
>Didn't like Eliot or Faulkner
He really didn't have very good taste after all
Why do you insist on pretending T.S. Eliot is a good author? You know he's not, you know he's mediocre, you know Americans are imbeciles, so why do you persist?
Anglo larper americans are alright.
>won the nobel prize
>mediocre
I bet you hate Bob Dylan as well
Yes, Bob is a homosexual hack who stole everything from Farina
What was your goal in obliterating your position?
Yes, that's what it is. He's wrong and you're right. Absolutely, it's the only logical conclusion. Or you're just a no taste pseud who never has and never will accomplish anything of note?
Yeah nah, this pedophile refugee was such a great writer. That's why we only know one of his fricking books. Nabokov got tainted by the USA and that's why he is such a collection of cope.
I didn't have access to the other criticisms on JSTOR if they are more detailed but I found this. It doesn't really change my mind about Faulkner and I wonder if Nabokov has a shred of empathy for what became of the South. There's a reason why Faulkner's revered there, it's because his voice resonated with how people really felt. But you know it's just not literature because it's about white trash and velvety Black folk.
Nabokov really was an anachronic dandy.
REV. ELIOT
>Second rate to plain awful:
>Cervantes: Don Quixote, a bad old book
That one is misplaced. Nabokov could not read Spanish and would not have ranked it with the same gravity as the others.
It's in line with his tastes. Cope
>Nabokov could not read Spanish and would not have ranked it with the same gravity as the others
If this is an argument against the nuances of translation, sure. However, Nabokov did state that it was “one of the most bitter and barbarous books ever penned" on account of its subject matter. In fact, he intended Pnin to be sort of the anti-Don Quixote, where the character’s humiliation would not be a point of amusement as what he felt Cervantes had done for Quixote
so it's based on feelings... lmao what a b***h
what did any of that have to do with feelings
he’s saying it’s not appropriate to treat a humiliated character with such cruelty
have you even read don quixote dude?
I thought he was being ironic - like the book is ironic. He taught a class on DQ and his lecture notes are published so i assumed he was admirer.
>Saul Bellow “a laughable mediocrity”
If literally nothing else, I'm glad he said it. Bellow is the proto-hack of latter 20th century literature.
>filtered by faulkner
>Jean Paul Sartre: a good trier but tired failure, of “cafe philosophy”
lmao I’m gonna use this one when someone mentions Sartre
I get dissing Freud because of his weird theories on sexuality but what does he have against Dostoevsky and Pasternak?
>but what does he have against Dostoevsky
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/23/magazine/nabokov-on-dostoyevsky.html
His takes on Jean-Paul Sartre, Freud, and Albert Camus are absolutely correct.
Sartre-gays are full of themselves and "cafe philsophy" is the perfect description for it.
>He didn't rank himself
Must be shit
Source: non-reader
>Louis-Ferdinand Celine: appears good but is untamed
Whats wrong with being untamed
> D.H Lawrence; silly, immature, cliché
🙁
also gay
>Cervantes: Don Quixote, a bad old book
>Cervantes: Don Quixote, a bad old book
Funny since in e-girlta he is read this book by his father before bed. I would have thought this was to show his appreciation of it.
He even has a 'Lectures on Don Quixote' which I was going to get sometime but don't know if I want to now after finding out he didn't like the book
>Ezra pound: ridiculous
Holding this opinion is grounds for suicide
Pound is ridiculous
imagine placing all of these authors under fricking Arthur Conan Doyle of all people
Did I turn into a schizophrenic didn't this thread just have 11 posts before I replied to it?
Schizophrenic. Sorry that you had to find out this way, anon
Nabokov couldn't read Italian so he had no business ranking Dante, and he knew it.
Wait how did you come up with this list and the specific rankings?
VNR
Nabokov considered Dante one of the top 5 writers of all time and said so in some interview which, I don't remember in which book, but it's there.
OP is just ranking from that old selection of quotes that gets memed around here. Nabokov had many other opinions.
Regardless, it's kind of irrelevant. Who cares what he liked?
What's so great about Dickens? What am I missing? I don't really enjoy reading his stuff.
You're still immature. You have to grow out of pseuddom first
That's not much of an answer. Explain in more detail what makes him great to mature people then?
agreed with the other guy. you gotta grow out of pseuddom. dickens is a master, his characters are variegated, his themes are as complex and deep and explored in all their plurality as any other great writer, and he's hilarious
I do not care about his opinions anymore after I read somewhere him bullshitting about his wife reading Anna Karenina when she was 6
OP sure does suck wiener.
>Karl Marx - Loathe him
How can he love Leo Tolstoy so much, yet "detest" two of his works?
Why would you care what a pedo has to say? His books evaluation is pretty clear: anything that even remotely praises moral values is garbage
I wasn't asking morons like yourself.
You American?
Nobody has to like all of an author's works equally.
just seems a bit weird he can call someone an absolute genius, then rant about how repulsive one of his works is and how much he detests it. Same thing with James Joyce; he says Ulysses proves he's an absolute genius, yet absolutely despises Finnegans Wake and says it's complete garbage.
He has a more nuanced take, he says passages in Finnegans Wake are genius but much of it is meh to terrible.
Because he liked some of his works and disliked others, how is that hard to understand?
Because he calls Tolstoy an absolute genius.
Why would a genius write anything "detestable"?
Are you moronic? He calls him a genius based on his genius works, not the ones he didn’t like/detested. Shakespeare was a genius but even he has some stinkers. You have the reasoning skills of a child.
Thank you for proving you're a complete moron who missed the point.
what point? you are not making any point other than "why does he call him genius if he dislikes SOME of his work?". Again, you have the reasoning skills of a 5 year old which is why you think you are making some kind of point.
You are such an embarrassingly stupid moron it's funny.
>"Pro-Bolshevist" listed as reason Doctor Zhivago is bad
Ideologue detected
leftists make poor writers. I'm sorry but it's true
>commies
can't into art
>left lib
can into art
>right lib
most natural position for an artist
>auth right
mostly can't, few exceptions are the religious writers who aren't afraid of appearing immoral and actually try and understand the world, most of them just retreat back to their Bibles and have pitifully low scores of Openness. The rare exceptions can be truly great like William Blake, but they are often not even read by the religious because they explore 'illegal perspectives'.
>commies
>can't into art
that's cope if i've ever seen it
>can't into art
yes, yes, of course
amusing that he's indifferent to Finnegans Wake because it's written in regional dialect.
Does he expect all wordplay to be without slang, it sounds as if he wasn't up to the challenge and went all sour grapes on it.
its fair not to like finnegans wake. The allegory is predictable like he says. i don't care though its great.
He was not at all, and pretended not to be. You find the book quoted in both e-girlta and Ada if I remember correctly, plus he uses images drawn from it (the color children), and apparently there's some literature online on how it influenced also Pale Fire and Bend Sinister.
Weird, thought he liked gogol? Also what did he mean by filming lewis carrol’s picnics?
>artificial coincidences
He complains about this in books like War & Peace, but couldn't the same thing be said about e-girlta? As soon as Charlotte Haze discovers Humbert is a pedophile attracted to her daughter, she very conveniently gets hit by a car and dies.
Lol true, that was borderline comedic. Having her just die without finding out, maybe with some suspicion, would have been more natural.
What would Nabokov think of Jordan Peterson?
he wouldn't
he wouldn't
he wouldn't
He wouldn’t
But if he did, “ridiculous”
he wouldn't but if he would: Rank moralist and didactist. Between the age of 14-19, but no longer. Esentially a writer for very young people. Romantic in the large sense.
jej
>genius, the highest inspiration, captivating and groundbreaking
>what would IQfy brainlets think of Jordan Peterson you mean?
IQfyners don't read.
>Racism against African-Americans appalled Nabokov, who touted Alexander Pushkin's multiracial background as an argument against segregation.
KEK
_Soyjak
>B-b-but Nabokov we don't want our kid bussed to the black school
Nabochad
>Pfft.. He'll be surrounded by little Pushkins!
>>Pfft.. He'll be surrounded by little Pushkins!
Little rappin' Pushkas.
He didn't enjoy music; that makes you second rate. Also Endgame is Becketts masterpiece; it's prose gays like him that Beckett succeeded in breaking away from. IMO it was the move that puts him in the cannon.
Vladimir Nabokov: the greatest midwit of all time?
That doesn't say much coming from an actual brainlet like yourself.
Gozzed
I hate Shakespeare so fricking much. I know it's inescapable, inbuilt in the Western mind whether you've read it or not, but I fricking hate him. Hate reading it. Hate watching it. Hate talking about it. Hate hate HATE. REEEEEEEEEEEEE
"I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful aesthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium... Several times I read the dramas and the comedies and historical plays, and I invariably underwent the same feelings: repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment. At the present time, before writing this preface, being desirous once more to test myself, I have, as an old man of seventy-five, again read the whole of Shakespeare, including the historical plays, the "Henrys," "Troilus and Cressida," "The Tempest", "Cymbeline", and I have felt, with even greater force, the same feelings,—this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits,—thereby distorting their aesthetic and ethical understanding,—is a great evil, as is every untruth."
I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Tolstoy. I was expecting Shakespeare and got a soap opera instead.
The fact Tolstoy was so vehement about his hatred for Shakespeare in is his later years is pretty ironic. Dude removed all his possessions and became ascetic for attention so that his works would be appreciated. Then after he realised no one cared, he began hating on an author who wrote purely out of passion and for the love of literature.
>he began hating on an author who wrote purely out of passion and for the love of literature.
You mean for money. He was an entertainer and wrote for the stage to pay the bills. He didn't even publish his plays and that's part of why so little is known about him.
Nice.
>It appears, therefore, that though Tolstoy can explain away nearly everything about Shakespeare, there is one thing that he cannot explain away, and that is his popularity. He himself is aware of this, and greatly puzzled by it. I said earlier that the answer to Tolstoy really lies in something he himself is obliged to say. He asks himself how it is that this bad, stupid and im-moral writer Shakespeare is everywhere admired, and finally he can only explain it as a sort of world-wide conspiracy to pervert the truth. Or it is a sort of collective hallucination — a hypnosis, he calls it — by which everyone except Tolstoy him-self is taken in. As to how this conspiracy or delusion began, he is obliged to set it down to the machinations of certain Ger-man critics at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They started telling the wicked lie that Shakespeare is a good writer, and no one since has had the courage to contradict them. Now, one need not spend very long over a theory of this kind. It is nonsense. The enormous majority of the people who have en-joyed watching Shakespeare's plays have never been influenced by any German critics, directly or indirectly. For Shakespeare's popularity is real enough, and it is a popularity that extends to ordinary, by no means bookish people. From his lifetime onwards he has been a stage favourite in England, and he is popular not only in the English-speaking countries but in most of Europe and parts of Asia. Almost as I speak the Soviet Government are celebrating the three hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, and in Ceylon I once saw a play of his being performed in some language of which I did not know a single word. One must conclude that mere is something good — something durable — in Shakespeare which millions of ordinary people can appreciate, though Tolstoy happened to be unable to do so. He can survive exposure of the fact that he is a confused thinker whose plays are full of improbabilities. He can no more be debunked by such methods than you can destroy a flower by preaching a sermon at it.
- Orwell
Argumentum ad populum as always with Orwell.
It's not just that the masses like Shakespeare, but that almost every single great writer has at one point expressed admiration for him. At that point you really should question the objectivity of your criticisms.
It's because Anglos overhype their shit. See: Shakespeare, The Beatles.
Have you tried The Tempest yet? It's my favorite Shakespeare play and might change your mind, anon-kun
I've not. Maybe I'll give it a shot one day. I've read and seen live all the staples: Hamlet, Macbeth, R&J, Othello, MoV... some of the film adaptions are nice -- particularly Cohen's Macbeth & Baz's R&J. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard) had a bigger impact on me that all of these, and I actually enjoyed it. Idk there's some fog/nausea that starts to creep over me whenever I start reading.. may be pathological.
kek
>some of the film adaptions are nice
>particularly Baz's R&J
Yes.
Don't worry we all know you're a brainlet.
>some of the film adaptions are nice -- particularly Cohen's Macbeth & Baz's R&J.
lmaoooo
>I hate Shakespeare so fricking much. I know it's inescapable, inbuilt in the Western mind whether you've read it or not, but I fricking hate him. Hate reading it. Hate watching it. Hate talking about it. Hate hate HATE. REEEEEEEEEEEEE
only anglophone countries jerk off to shakespeare
Make do
Pluck a few hairs
If he were a random anon, IQfy would be telling him to kill himself.
yeah because he has shit taste. Faulkner is great
KYS NABOKOV
Nice
I've got a bunch of shakespeare books and a john milton tome coming in the mail
I hope I can enjoy them as much as he did
Wish I could read pushkin but after 3 months of russian I still can't read him
soup du jour
interesting this guy has so many strong opinions on what a good writer is yet could never write anything that wasn't drivel
>william shakespeare a genius and cervantes an awful writer
this dude is moronic
>no argument
No problem idiot. You are clearly much dumber than he is.
>t. nabokov
his argument against don quixote literally was "bad old book"
No, that's just what you're reading on IQfy, idiot. Nabokov has written extensively detailed essays on many books and clearly has a stronger understanding of what constitutes high quality writing than a pea brain like yourself ever will.
yet still got filtered by cervantes, got it
I'm not even that Anon, but the absolute state of this guy's fans.
Where's the consistency? Where did he express (pecisely and in detail) what a high quality writing is? If there's such essay than bless us with it, not just call any non-nabokov fan a 'brainlet' or idiot.
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/23/magazine/nabokov-on-dostoyevsky.html
>It is questionable whether one can really discuss the aspects of ''realism'' or of ''human experience'' when considering an author whose gallery of characters consists almost exclusively of neurotics and lunatics. Besides all this, Dostoyevsky's characters have yet another remarkable feature: Throughout the book they do not develop as personalities. We get them all complete at the beginning of the tale, and so they remain without any considerable changes, although their surroundings may alter and the most extraordinary things may happen to them. In the case of Raskolnikov in ''Crime and Punishment,'' for instance, we see a man go from premeditated murder to the promise of an achievement of some kind of harmony with the outer world, but all this happens somehow from without: Innerly even Raskolnikov does not go through any true development of personality, and the other heroes of Dostoyevsky do even less so. The only thing that develops, vacillates, takes unexpected sharp turns, deviates completely to include new people and circumstances, is the plot.
God damn.
That’s an odd criticism from him. I’ve only read e-girlta, but only the girl has any character development. Humbert is more or less static.
it feels to me like dostoyevsky simply uses a foundation or frame of realism to fill up with his own expressions of the human experience. expressionist subjects distorted in evocative ways which remain true to real feelings and internal subjective experiences which humans face, painted against a grounded realist setting, which effectively contrasts our innermost conscious experiences with the world around us, resulting in a depiction of our inner struggle to stay grounded and balance our feelings and impulses with the world. in a way, it paints a much deeper picture of the human psychology and the human experience than simple realism
the idea that this pseud could shit on that just because "it doesn't follow conventional rules of realism" is just pathetic
>muh realism, muh character progression
kek, lmao
He has lectures about Don Quixote in book form that you can just download and read if you weren’t such a moron and did even the slightest effort to investigate for yourself.
I didn't ask about Don Quixote you moronic Black person. I said if you have something, in wich he expresses what is good writing than forward it to us. I'm not intrested in a critique of a single book.
Harold Bloom has a clearer, more consistent, and stronger understanding of high quality writing. Nabokov was a sensationalist contrarian.
>Harold Bloom has a clearer, more consistent, and stronger understanding of high quality writing
It's easy for idiots like you to make claims like this, but for some reason you can never actually back it up with proper analysis.
Pea-brains like yourself are simply not qualified to decide what is and what isn't good writing.
It’s not surprising he would hate the book, he clearly dislikes anything that has Christ symbolism in it.
he literally calls john milton a genius and paradise lost a masterpiece you idiot.
Kafkaesquely
Nabokov was a great writer, but he had such a poor understanding of western literature and its history that I wonder how he ever managed to bullshit his way into being an university lecturer.
>doesn't like Pound, Celine, Poe, Kipling or Chesterton
Yeah this guy is a certified israelite
He called Dostoevsky’s the double a supreme work of art
>Jane Austen
>Over Flaubert, Borges, or even Lewis Carroll
Nabakov is apparently moronic
Nabokov wasn't smart enough to understand Don Quixote so he declared the book was bad. In reality it simply went over his head.
Also he stole most of his good ideas from Borges.
The "good but immature" list is pretty spot-on.
balzac is based frick nabo
idiot
What did Nabokov think of Thomas Hardy or Graham Greene?
bump
I have nightmares about Nabokov's ghost telling everyone that I'm on a nonentity, bros.
>when a midwit writer thinks he´s the greatest
ohhhh another pleb, NEXT!
>midwit writer
Yeah so midwit that a single book of his earned more than 80 academic studies on it three decades after it came out
>thinks he's the greatest
I mean he's done stuff that makes you wonder how far his ego went (e.g., his own short story being one of only two to earn an "A+" rating throughout the duration of his post as reviewer for The New Yorker), but come on man these are just opinions from a man capable enough to develop his own opinions on a particular subject
>Yeah so midwit that a single book of his earned more than 80 academic studies on it three decades after it came out
comparing him to the greatest novelists, yeah he´s a midwit
>of only two to earn an "A+" rating throughout the duration of his post as reviewer for The New Yorker
that doesn´t mean shit
>comparing him to the greatest novelists, yeah he´s a midwit
Again, where is the “comparing” exactly? He’s not saying “John Milton: an absolute genius… but my stuff was better.” The only times he mentions anything about himself serve simply to provide context for the ages he’d enjoyed them at
>that doesn´t mean shit
If you genuinely can’t see how his ego might come into play in that situation, then I don’t know what to tell you
>Again, where is the “comparing” exactly? He’s not saying “John Milton: an absolute genius… but my stuff was better.” The only times he mentions anything about himself serve simply to provide context for the ages he’d enjoyed them at
it´s the subtext, he thinks he´s a better writer than Dostoyevsky/Cervantes, like a midget thinking he´s a better fighter than someone who does boxing for a living
So what’s you’re saying in the specific is that
>a musician cannot comment negatively on certain qualities of Bach’s music (e.g., “he only ever wrote for 2-3 voices”) without betraying the impression that he thinks he can do better
>an artist cannot comment negatively on certain aesthetic qualities of Michelangelo’s works (e.g., “David’s dick is too small”) without betraying the impression that he can do better
>etc etc
bringing you to the general point of
>any criticism of anyone else’s work betrays the impression that the person criticizing can do better
Am I understanding you correctly?
it´s the way he criticized them, not the fact of him critiquing the artist, he´s full of jelously and inferiority complex, he´s only known for one book and the book was popular because of its controversial subject, you do the math
Why do I keep seeing this guy's opinion coming up on this board? Who gives a shit what some guy thinks. He isn't on the same level as some people he considers second rate.
>Why do I keep seeing this guy's opinion coming up on this board?
Because he trashes well stablished writers (specially Dosto, a lit favorite) with his opinions, and controversy generates engagement.
Nabokov's criteria for what makes great literature is highly idiosyncratic. In short, he is an aesthete.
I very much like what I've read of his work, but I learned to stop taking seriously his opinions on literature. His analysis of texts that he considers great can be very interesting and helpful ( e.g. The Metamorphosis), but a person is doing himself a great disservice in taking Nabokov's assessments as instructive
for what should (and should not) be in the canon.
I mean. . . Dostoevsky is third rate? In what fricking world.
Nabokov does see greatness in writers that are overlooked by academia. Updike, for example. When you figure Nabokov's "aesthetic bliss" criteria, it's not surprising he would appreciate Updike's work. I mention Updike because some in this thread are citing Bloom as a more reliable source for what counts as great literature. For the most part they're right but Bloom overlooks Updike in my opinion.
>Marcel Proust: First half of ‘fairy tale’ In Search of Lost Time Vol 1, 4th
Why did he put metamorphosis above in search of lost time? Also, not fan of James Joyce. Besides that who am I to judge a genius like nabokov.
He was a genius because he was capable of saying moronic shit and then write great books. Same as Tolstoy shittalking on Shakespeare.
>Why did he put metamorphosis above in search of lost time?
Why shouldn't he?
Posy-sniffing
The coveted double-nabokov.
Spelling
disagree with a lot of these dismissals but otherwise is kind of refreshing to see "great" writers like Henry James being critiqued by other well-respected writers.
There are lots of writers that despise James.
Rounded. Remainder.
Is it getting hotter?
Did Nabokov not read Hafez? I would put him in Pushkin-tier.
>J.D Salinger: one of the best talents of recent years by far
Interesting, because he doesn't fit Nabokov's model. Salinger didn't care much for visual details. There's hardly any descriptive prose in his works.
It has been a while since I have read Salinger. How would you describe the attributes of his prose?
Focus on interior monologue and dialogue. Hardly any description of physical objects or textures like in Nabokov. Very skilled characterization and observation of human psychology. Plot very secondary.
I’ve always felt Nabokov was tongue in cheek regarding his opinions.
Vladimir Nabokov-dislike him. Vacuous and sterile. A diddler of sentences. A favorite of women between the ages of 15 and 25, and pedophiles