/lit/

In the morning I read these in sequence. Pieces from Russian Writers, Sensors, and Readers by Vladimir Nabokov, read at Festival of Arts, Cornell, 10 April 1956.

“Russian literature has a notion, an immediate idea. This notion in the minds of non-Russians is generally limited to the awareness of Russia’s having produced half a dozen great masters of prose between the middle, the 19th century, and the first decade of the 20th. This notion is ampler in the minds of Russian readers, since it comprises, in addition to the novelists, a number of untranslatable poets. But even so, the native mind remains focused on the resplendent orb of the 19th century. In other words, Russian literature is a recent event. It is also a limited event, and the foreigner’s mind tends to regard it as something complete, something finished once and for all. This is mainly due to the bleakness of the typically regional literature produced during the last four decades under the Soviet rule.”

“Gogol’s case in the late ’30s and ’40s was somewhat different. First, let’s me say that his play, the government inspector, and his novel Dead Souls, are products of Gogol’s own fancy, his private nightmares peopled with his own incomparable goblins. They are not and could not be a picture of the Russia of his time, since, apart from other reasons, he hardly knew Russia. And, indeed, his failure to write a continuation of dead souls was due to his not possessing sufficient data, and to the impossibility of using the little people of his fancy for a realistic work that would improve the morals of his country. But the radical critics perceived in the play and in the novel, an indictment of bribery. Of coarse living, of governmental iniquity, of slavery. A revolutionary intention was read into Gogol’s works, and he, a timorous, law abiding citizen, with many influential friends in the Conservative Party, was so appalled at the things that had been found in his works that, in his subsequent writings, he endeavored to prove that the play and the novel, far from being revolutionary, had really conformed to religious tradition and to the mysticism which he later evolved.”

“It’s interesting to ponder the fact that there’s no real difference between what the Western fascists wanted of literature and what the Bolsheviks want. Let me quote, “The personality of the artist should develop freely and without restraint. One thing, however, we demand, acknowledgment of our creed.” Thus spoke one of the big Nazis, Dr. Rosenberg, Minister of Culture in Hitler’s Germany. Another quotation, “Every artist has the right to create freely, but we, communists, must guide him according to plan.” Thus spoke Lenin. Both of these are textual quotations, and their similitude would have been highly diverting, had not the whole thing been so very sad.”

“We guide your pens. This, then, was the fundamental law laid down by the Communist party. And this was expected to produce “vital” literature. Since a definite limit is set to an author’s imagination and to free will, every proletarian novel must end happily with the Soviets triumphing, and thus the author is faced with the dreadful task of having to weave an interesting plot when the outcome is in advance sufficiently known to the reader.”

“Olga was silent. Ah, cried Vladimir. Why can’t you love me as I love you? I love my country, she said. So do I, he exclaimed. And there is something I love even more strongly. Olga continued, disengaging herself from the young man’s embrace. And that is, he queried. Olga, let her limpid blue eyes rest on him, and answered quickly, It is the party.”