The Blind Spot in Nabokov’s Perfect Taste

David Lapadat | Music PhD
1 day ago
7 min read

In a filmed interview recorded in September 1965, Vladimir Nabokov placed three dismissals beside four declarations of greatness. He called Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice “asinine,” described Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago as melodramatic and badly written, and reduced Faulkner to “corn-cobby chronicles.” Then came Nabokov’s twentieth-century summit: Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s Transformation—the novella usually published in English as The Metamorphosis—Bely’s Petersburg, and the first half of Proust.

A prepared version of that answer later appeared in Strong Opinions, a title that captures both the exhilaration and the risk of Nabokov’s critical manner.

The sequence exhilarates because Nabokov refuses the diplomatic fog that often passes for criticism, but it is also troubling. His insults sound like conclusions without yet containing arguments. A reader may share his impatience with Mann’s ceremony or Faulkner’s solemnity and still ask the question that Nabokov’s performance tries to outrun: when does exact taste become a blind spot?

Nabokov did not care too much about form; he sometimes promoted a precise local objection into a verdict that another writer’s achievement did not exist. His critical eye remained sharp, while the error came from assuming that every important literary object had to fit inside its field of vision.

Taste Is Evidence, Not Jurisdiction

Nabokov was unusually candid about the personal basis of his judgments. In The Paris Review, he called Hemingway and Faulkner nonentities “insofar as my taste in reading is concerned.” The qualification tells us that subjective taste is not fraudulent: it records where a reader’s attention quickens, which devices feel dead, and which kinds of pressure feel earned.

But the qualification also marks a boundary. “This means nothing to my taste” is a report about the critic. “This writer is nothing” is a claim about the work. Nabokov often crossed from the first sentence into the second with such speed that the force of his style concealed the change in scale.

Faulkner makes that change easy to see. Nabokov offered the public verdict but little public demonstration. Absalom, Absalom! supplies a counterexample—not proof that Nabokov secretly admired it, or even that he read it closely, but proof that “corn-cobby” cannot settle the case. The novel makes history hereditary through competing narrators. Each voice inherits facts already bent by desire; chronology keeps reopening because the past has no uncontested owner. Its repetitions are not an alternative to form. They are the form by which a ruined family becomes a problem of knowledge.

A critic can dislike that pressure. He cannot abolish it by naming the mannerism that carries it.

Dostoevsky and the Inflation of a Real Objection

Nabokov’s case against Dostoevsky was more serious than a string of insults. In his lectures he identified melodrama, sentimental machinery, mystery plotting, ideological debate, and what he regarded as religious journalism. He could also concede what his caricature threatened to hide: Dostoevsky was an intricate plotter; particular scenes showed mastery; The Double was, in Nabokov’s judgment, his best work.

Those concessions change the dispute. Nabokov identified genuine defects and then let them define the whole writer. Dostoevsky’s theatricality can be crude, but it can also be the method by which incompatible claims occupy the same stage and refuse the civility of synthesis. Humiliation, doctrine, comedy, confession, and cruelty do not take turns; they interrupt one another. The excess is sometimes a failure of control and sometimes the designed experience of a mind or community whose conflicts cannot be made elegant.

Nabokov’s own fiction complicates his sentence. In Despair, he returns to the territory of The Double but changes its mechanism. Hermann does not discover a likeness, or at least, not only that; his narration manufactures the resemblance that his vanity requires. Nabokov could reject Dostoevsky’s system and still recognize that doubling remained an exact instrument for exposing a lie.

A stronger critical position distinguishes a reusable form from one writer’s handling of it instead of dismissing both.

Mann and the Work a Defect Cannot Cancel

Nabokov returned to Thomas Mann repeatedly. He called him second-rate and conventional, and his paragraph-by-paragraph attack on “The Railway Accident” shows that the hostility was not born of inattention. The diagnosis has force: Mann can load a sentence with the announcement of its own importance. Symbol and cultural reference sometimes come with their labels attached.

But, truth be told, Death in Venice cannot be reduced to that defect. Its ceremony is also a pressure chamber. Aschenbach’s disciplined public style and his private disintegration are made from the same material; the prose does not simply decorate decay but shows a life of control trying to preserve its grammar after desire has broken its authority. The novella may be overinsistent. That doesn't mean we should ignore its achievement, that lies partly in making overinsistence belong to the character, the culture, and the narrative surface at once.

Again, Nabokov locates something real and mistakes it for the limits of the object. A microscope can reveal a flaw in the weave, yes, but it cannot decide whether the cloth has another scale of design.

Freud: The Case Nabokov Almost Wins

Freud is different since he was not another novelist competing for a place in Nabokov’s canon. He offered a general method for reading dreams, symptoms, slips, childhood, and art. Nabokov’s objections therefore reached beyond taste. He distrusted, up to the brink of disgust, the way psychoanalytic interpretation could assign prefabricated meanings to singular details and turn a person into an instance of a theory.

That suspicion could be exact. Freud’s study of Leonardo famously built part of its argument on a mistranslation: Leonardo’s nibbio, a kite, became a vulture. Leland de la Durantaye uses this case to show why Nabokov’s resistance to psychoanalytic generalization deserves more than amused dismissal. If the particular word is wrong, the symbolic structure erected above it is not rescued by its elegance.

But de la Durantaye also identifies the reversal. Nabokov condemned Freud for generalizing violence, then made “Freud” the name of a single vulgar mechanism. His polemic ceased to discriminate among clinical claim, cultural vocabulary, bad literary application, and speculative myth. The critic of reduction became reductive.

Freud’s scientific legacy remains disputed. His cultural vocabulary nonetheless became widely influential. It gave twentieth-century culture a shared, contested language for repression, dreams, slips, and self-deception. Rejecting the theory does not make that history disappear. Nor does identifying its errors prove that every work shaped by its questions is artistically false.

Nabokov’s fictional padograph and moving paintings make the fear of reduction literal: a singular mark becomes a repeatable pattern that can circulate without its source. The image clarifies Nabokov’s best objection to Freud. It also warns against his worst habit as a critic. A pattern can expose something, and in the same time can become dangerous when it claims to exhaust the person or work from which it was taken.

What Nabokov’s Own Canon Disproves

It is tempting to explain these judgments by saying that Nabokov chose form over morality, history, psychology, or ideas. His own favorites refuse that account. Ulysses is saturated with politics, religion, history, bodies, and grief. Petersburg makes revolutionary violence and imperial space inseparable from its verbal design. Proust is a social and psychological anatomist. Tolstoy, whom Nabokov revered, cannot be confined to decorative precision.

Kafka is Nabokov's decisive counterpressure. His lecture on The Metamorphosis joins beauty to pity. His attention to the insect’s physical details does not seal form away from feeling, as it plainly makes feeling answerable to the created object. The particular prevents pity from becoming a slogan, while pity prevents exactness from becoming taxidermy.

The deeper division in Nabokov’s criticism is particularized meaning against explanation that arrives already assembled, not form against content. That distinction accounts for much of his greatness as a reader without justifying the treatment of every alien artistic law as a prefabricated idea.

When the Novels Outgrow the Verdicts

Nabokov’s fiction is often more hospitable than his polemics for the simple fact that a novel can preserve competing kinds of truth without deciding which one deserves to exist. Pnin is the clearest case. The comedy depends on exact errors of speech, timing, and social placement. Yet the same formal precision gradually exposes the limitations of the people who think those errors give them possession of Timofey Pnin. The novel does not abandon style in order to discover pity.

Pnin’s transfer of comic authority matters beyond one character because it demonstrates a power that Nabokov’s critical verdicts sometimes surrender: the ability to let a first judgment remain visible while another scale of judgment transforms it.

The same complication operates in Despair. Hermann’s pattern is just false, but also persuasive enough to organize a crime and a narrative. Nabokov makes us inspect the craft of the error without mistaking craft for truth. His novel can hold aesthetic admiration and moral resistance in the same sentence. His polemics too often choose the cleaner pleasure of expulsion.

This does not make Dostoevsky, Mann, Faulkner, or Freud immune to Nabokov’s objections. But those objections should be answerable to scale. A defect may be real and still not be the governing fact. A method may be dangerous and still alter the language in which later minds understand themselves. A writer may offend one exquisite taste and remain capable of achievements that taste was not built to register.

Nabokov’s critical vision deserves admiration because it can isolate the counterfeit detail. But blindness, and I strongly think this is the correct word here, begins only when that isolation is mistaken for a complete map. The answer is neither to reverse his rankings nor soften his judgments into politeness, but to apply his devotion to particulars more consistently than he sometimes did—and to read his novels, where the evidence is usually allowed to exceed the verdict.