the image that broke

puffed up, ephemeral

From the book cut up by that wiki page:

>>Is it true that you have called Hemingway and Conrad “writers of books for boys”?
>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 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.

of your mastery of our language, you are frequently compared with Joseph Conrad.
>Well, I’ll put it this way. When a boy, I was a voracious reader, as all boy writers seem to be, and between 8 and 14 I used to enjoy tremendously the romantic productions—romantic in the large sense—of such people as Conan Doyle, Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, and other authors who are essentially writers for very young people. But as I have well said somewhere before, I differ from Joseph Conradically. First of all, he had not been writing in his native tongue before he became an English writer, and secondly, I cannot stand today his polished clichés and primitive clashes. He once wrote that he preferred Mrs. Garnett’s translation of Anna Karenin to the original! This makes one dream—“ça fait rêver” as Flaubert used to say when faced with some abysmal stupidity. [...]

Several times he compares Conrad unfavorably to H. G. Wells, whom Nabokov loved.

I get the impression that he rags on Conrad especially because he used to like him (the cringe impulse) and because they're often compared. The core of his dislike is genuine and unforced but those circumstances easily breed a fixation. (That's just a guess though.)

That isn't any kind of contradiction.

He didn't express it in exactly that way

>Doctor Zhivago
i just bought that book the other day and have no idea what its about

According to Nabokov
>Any intelligent Russian would see at once that the book is pro-Bolshevist and historically false, if only because it ignores the Liberal Revolution of spring, 1917, while making the saintly doctor accept with delirious joy the Bolshevist coup d’état seven months later—all of which is in keeping with the party line.
Notable context is that Nabokov's father was involved in the provisional government after the February Revolution, went into exile after the October revolution, and was ultimately killed by a tsarist. So he must have taken personal offense at that simplification.