This thread is the direct result of a round of intersting conversations in the Women and Philosophy thread, regarding whether one must have populist or at least somewhat accessible methods and messages.
So, I was reading this old interview with Vladimir Nabokov, and I realized, damn, maybe it is rather useless to appeal to the currents of the times: the egalitarian populist masses. Maybe, in some senses, infoterror and his cronies are correct (although not when arguing on public metal forums) For an artist it is a easy solution: no, never give in to the rabble, as if one does, they produce trite trash. But what about everything else? Is it all just useless? Philosophy, Politics, Science, ideologies, and so on. Does it matter if no one but a elite specialized few can understand the intelligent arguments and ideas? Or is that the problem with most of these specialized subjects and areas? A problem in which only a few people have knowledge of what is going on, and the rest of the world is in the dark.
Well, please if anyone cares to, read this somewhat amusing diatribe from old Vlad discussing the ills of society and populism.
VN's opinions: on the modern world; on contemporary
politics; on contemporary writers; on drug addicts who might
consider Lolita "square"?
I doubt if we can postulate the objective existence of a
"modern world" on which an artist should have any definite and
important opinion. It has been tried, of course, and even
carried to extravagant lengths. A hundred years ago, in Russia,
the most eloquent and influential reviewers were left-wing,
radical, utilitarian, political critics, who demanded that
Russian novelists and poets portray and sift the modern scene.
In those distant times, in that remote country, a typical
critic would insist that a literary artist be a "reporter on
the topics of the day," a social commentator, a class-war
correspondent. That was half a century before the Bolshevist
police not only revived the dismal so-called progressive
(really, regressive) trend characteristic of the eighteen
sixties and seventies, but, as we all know, enforced it. In the
old days, to be sure, great lyrical poets or the incomparable
prose artist who composed Anna Karenin (which should be
transliterated without the closing "a"-- she was not a
ballerina) could cheerfully ignore the left-wing progressive
Philistines who requested Tyutchev or Tolstoy to mirror
politico-social soapbox gesticulations instead of dwelling on
an aristocratic love affair or the beauties of nature. The
dreary principles once voiced in the reign of Alexander the
Second and their subsequent sinister transmutation into the
decrees of gloomy police states (Kosygin's dour face expresses
that gloom far better than Stalin's dashing mustache) come to
my mind whenever I hear today rétro-progressive book
reviewers in America and England plead for a little more social
comment, a little less artistic whimsy. The accepted notion of
a "modern world" continuously flowing around us belongs to the
same type of abstraction as say, the "quaternary period" of
paleontolo-gy. What I feel to be the real modern world is the
world the artist creates, his own mirage, which becomes a new
mir ("world" in Russian) by the very act of his
shedding, as it were, the age he lives in. My mirage is
produced in my private desert, an arid but ardent place, with
the sign No Caravans Allowed on the trunk of a lone palm. Of
course, good minds do exist whose caravans of general ideas
lead somewhere-- to curious bazaars, to photogenic temples; but
an independent novelist cannot derive much true benefit from
tagging along.
I would also want to establish first a specific definition
of the term politics, and that might mean dipping again in the
remote past. Let me simplify matters by saying that in my
parlor politics as well as in open-air statements (when
subduing, for instance, a glib foreigner who is always glad to
join our domestic demonstrators in attacking America), I
content myself with remarking that what is bad for the Reds is
good for me. I will abstain from details (they might lead to a
veritable slalom of qualificatory parentheses), adding merely
that I do not have any neatly limited political views or rather
that such views as I have shade off into a vague old-fashioned
liberalism. Much less vaguely-- quite adamantically, or even
adamantinely-- 1 am aware of a central core of spirit in me
that flashes and jeers at the brutal farce of totalitarian
states, such as Russia, and her embarrassing tumors, such as
China. A feature of my inner prospect is the absolute abyss
yawning between the barbed-wire tangle of police states and the
spacious freedom of thought we enjoy in America and Western
Europe.
I am bored by writers who join the social-comment racket.
I despise the corny Philistine fad of flaunting four-letter
words. I also refuse to find merit in a novel just because it
is by a brave Black in Africa or a brave White in Russia-- or
by any representative of any single group in America. Frankly,
a national, folklore, class, masonic, religious, or any other
communal aura involuntarily prejudices me against a novel,
making It harder for me to peel the offered fruit so as to get
at the nectar of possible talent. I could name, but will not, a
number of modern artists whom I read purely for pleasure, and
not for edification. I find comic the amalgamation of certain
writers under a common label of, say, "Cape Codpiece Peace
Resistance" or "Welsh Working-Upperclass Rehabilitation" or
"New Hairwave School." Incidentally, I frequently hear the
distant whining of people who complain in print that I dislike
the writers whom they venerate such as Faulkner, Mann,
Camus, Dreiser, and of course Dostoevski. But I can assure them
that because I detest certain writers I am not impairing the
well-being of the plaintiffs in whom the images of my victims
happen to form organic galaxies of esteem. I can prove, indeed,
that the works of those authors really exist independently and
separately from the organs of affection throbbing in the
systems of irate strangers.
Drug addicts, especially young ones, are conformists
flocking together in sticky groups, and I do not write for
groups, nor approve of group therapy (the big scene in the
Freudian Farce); as I have said often enough, I write for
myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the
horizons of shimmering deserts. Young dunces who turn to drugs
cannot read Lolita, or any of my books; some in fact
cannot read at all. Let me also observe that the term "square"
already dates as a slang word, for nothing dates quicker than
radical youth, nor is there anything more Philistine, more
bourgeois, more ovine than this business of drug duncery. Half
a century ago, a similar fashion among the smart set of St.
Petersburg was cocaine sniffing combined with phony
orientalities. The better and brighter minds of my young
American readers are far removed from those juvenile fads and
faddists. I also used to know in the past a Communist agent who
got so involved in trying to wreck anti-Bolshevist groups by
distributing drugs among them that he became an addict himself
and lapsed into a dreamy state of commendable metempsychic
sloth. He must be grazing today on some grassy slope in Tibet
if he has not yet lined the coat of the fortunate shepherd
So, I was reading this old interview with Vladimir Nabokov, and I realized, damn, maybe it is rather useless to appeal to the currents of the times: the egalitarian populist masses. Maybe, in some senses, infoterror and his cronies are correct (although not when arguing on public metal forums) For an artist it is a easy solution: no, never give in to the rabble, as if one does, they produce trite trash. But what about everything else? Is it all just useless? Philosophy, Politics, Science, ideologies, and so on. Does it matter if no one but a elite specialized few can understand the intelligent arguments and ideas? Or is that the problem with most of these specialized subjects and areas? A problem in which only a few people have knowledge of what is going on, and the rest of the world is in the dark.
Well, please if anyone cares to, read this somewhat amusing diatribe from old Vlad discussing the ills of society and populism.
VN's opinions: on the modern world; on contemporary
politics; on contemporary writers; on drug addicts who might
consider Lolita "square"?
I doubt if we can postulate the objective existence of a
"modern world" on which an artist should have any definite and
important opinion. It has been tried, of course, and even
carried to extravagant lengths. A hundred years ago, in Russia,
the most eloquent and influential reviewers were left-wing,
radical, utilitarian, political critics, who demanded that
Russian novelists and poets portray and sift the modern scene.
In those distant times, in that remote country, a typical
critic would insist that a literary artist be a "reporter on
the topics of the day," a social commentator, a class-war
correspondent. That was half a century before the Bolshevist
police not only revived the dismal so-called progressive
(really, regressive) trend characteristic of the eighteen
sixties and seventies, but, as we all know, enforced it. In the
old days, to be sure, great lyrical poets or the incomparable
prose artist who composed Anna Karenin (which should be
transliterated without the closing "a"-- she was not a
ballerina) could cheerfully ignore the left-wing progressive
Philistines who requested Tyutchev or Tolstoy to mirror
politico-social soapbox gesticulations instead of dwelling on
an aristocratic love affair or the beauties of nature. The
dreary principles once voiced in the reign of Alexander the
Second and their subsequent sinister transmutation into the
decrees of gloomy police states (Kosygin's dour face expresses
that gloom far better than Stalin's dashing mustache) come to
my mind whenever I hear today rétro-progressive book
reviewers in America and England plead for a little more social
comment, a little less artistic whimsy. The accepted notion of
a "modern world" continuously flowing around us belongs to the
same type of abstraction as say, the "quaternary period" of
paleontolo-gy. What I feel to be the real modern world is the
world the artist creates, his own mirage, which becomes a new
mir ("world" in Russian) by the very act of his
shedding, as it were, the age he lives in. My mirage is
produced in my private desert, an arid but ardent place, with
the sign No Caravans Allowed on the trunk of a lone palm. Of
course, good minds do exist whose caravans of general ideas
lead somewhere-- to curious bazaars, to photogenic temples; but
an independent novelist cannot derive much true benefit from
tagging along.
I would also want to establish first a specific definition
of the term politics, and that might mean dipping again in the
remote past. Let me simplify matters by saying that in my
parlor politics as well as in open-air statements (when
subduing, for instance, a glib foreigner who is always glad to
join our domestic demonstrators in attacking America), I
content myself with remarking that what is bad for the Reds is
good for me. I will abstain from details (they might lead to a
veritable slalom of qualificatory parentheses), adding merely
that I do not have any neatly limited political views or rather
that such views as I have shade off into a vague old-fashioned
liberalism. Much less vaguely-- quite adamantically, or even
adamantinely-- 1 am aware of a central core of spirit in me
that flashes and jeers at the brutal farce of totalitarian
states, such as Russia, and her embarrassing tumors, such as
China. A feature of my inner prospect is the absolute abyss
yawning between the barbed-wire tangle of police states and the
spacious freedom of thought we enjoy in America and Western
Europe.
I am bored by writers who join the social-comment racket.
I despise the corny Philistine fad of flaunting four-letter
words. I also refuse to find merit in a novel just because it
is by a brave Black in Africa or a brave White in Russia-- or
by any representative of any single group in America. Frankly,
a national, folklore, class, masonic, religious, or any other
communal aura involuntarily prejudices me against a novel,
making It harder for me to peel the offered fruit so as to get
at the nectar of possible talent. I could name, but will not, a
number of modern artists whom I read purely for pleasure, and
not for edification. I find comic the amalgamation of certain
writers under a common label of, say, "Cape Codpiece Peace
Resistance" or "Welsh Working-Upperclass Rehabilitation" or
"New Hairwave School." Incidentally, I frequently hear the
distant whining of people who complain in print that I dislike
the writers whom they venerate such as Faulkner, Mann,
Camus, Dreiser, and of course Dostoevski. But I can assure them
that because I detest certain writers I am not impairing the
well-being of the plaintiffs in whom the images of my victims
happen to form organic galaxies of esteem. I can prove, indeed,
that the works of those authors really exist independently and
separately from the organs of affection throbbing in the
systems of irate strangers.
Drug addicts, especially young ones, are conformists
flocking together in sticky groups, and I do not write for
groups, nor approve of group therapy (the big scene in the
Freudian Farce); as I have said often enough, I write for
myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the
horizons of shimmering deserts. Young dunces who turn to drugs
cannot read Lolita, or any of my books; some in fact
cannot read at all. Let me also observe that the term "square"
already dates as a slang word, for nothing dates quicker than
radical youth, nor is there anything more Philistine, more
bourgeois, more ovine than this business of drug duncery. Half
a century ago, a similar fashion among the smart set of St.
Petersburg was cocaine sniffing combined with phony
orientalities. The better and brighter minds of my young
American readers are far removed from those juvenile fads and
faddists. I also used to know in the past a Communist agent who
got so involved in trying to wreck anti-Bolshevist groups by
distributing drugs among them that he became an addict himself
and lapsed into a dreamy state of commendable metempsychic
sloth. He must be grazing today on some grassy slope in Tibet
if he has not yet lined the coat of the fortunate shepherd
