Word: nabokovs
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Still, the label that in one sense best suits Nabokov's practice and precept as a writer is art for art's sake...
...views on what he regards as the two principal scourges of the century ?Communism and Freudianism?are staunch. Nabokov sees both as dreadful infringements upon creative freedom. "The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me," he says. "My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones or played in theaters...
...Nabokov's novels, prefaces and discourses drip with scathing references to Freud. His basic objection to Freudian theories is that they slight the creative imagination by putting it in a sexual straitjacket and by insisting that dreams and images are determined mechanistically. "I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud," he writes, "with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying from their natural nooks upon the love life of their parents." Nabokov may yet get his wish to see Shakespeare in heaven...
...inclined to deny that any utility, morality or heavy philosophical meaning should be attributed to his art. He dismisses such suggestions with the same scorn that he once made use of when a clubwoman asked him what butterflies were for. Nevertheless, certain deductions can be drawn from Nabokov's writing. In Bend Sinister, he composed a picture of crude, lumpish evil-in-power, and he put Yeats' much quoted "rough beast" into a Bolshevik or Nazi Bethlehem. Thus Prospero-Nabokov always knew Caliban, whether he was known as Hitler or Stalin or by some other name...
...starts early for Vladimir Nabokov, when the nervy choughs commence kissing outside the sixth floor of the Montreux Palace Hotel. Not that there has been much night for him. "I am the insomniac of universal literature," he cries. "My wet nurse complained. I was always up, smiling and looking around with my bright eyes. I am awakened by my own snore, which is a Nabokovian paradox. Helpful pills do exist, but I am afraid of them. My habitual hallucinations are quite monstrously sufficient, thank Hades. Looking at it objectively, I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced...