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[NABOKOV-L] Nabokov's Obituary by Alfred Kazin (TNR,1977)
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Jim Twiggs sends: THE NEW REPUBLIC, July 2 3, 1977 - Vladimir Nabokov, 1899-1977 - Obituary
Wisdom in Exile by Alfred Kazin
"Nabokov's death at 78 came as a shock. He had such majestic self-confidence in his genius, his learning, in Nabokov as a Russian, Nabokov as an American, Nabokov as novelist, translator, scholar, entomologist, sportsman, political skeptic, that no writer could have more enjoyed and trusted life. There was so much gaiety and pride in being Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov that I imagined him ...a centenarian and genius exuding the same airy and humorous power." For Kazin, Nabokov's "mind was at once ecstatic, meticulous, wildly humorous, fantastic, yet marked by rigorous intellectual devotion."
"The cherished first son in a St. Petersburg family," Nabokov was intent on following his family's democratic tradition, "carrying out as a Russian writer in the emigration even when he wrote in English-as a scholar, teacher and unrelenting critic of the totalitarian thinking and practices that were to mark Lenin's influence on the century." For Kazin, such dedication could "seem to be at variance with the novelist's reputation as a wilfully eccentric, perverse and obscure writer with a vaguely shady intent...But Nabokov, the last of the great 20th century modernists, was at heart as deeply traditionalist as Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Eliot" and true to the modernist's experimental technique and style, and to its "provocative in intent, as a protest against mass society and conformism...a revolt of individual genius against life without moral definition."
Kazin stresses Nabokov's "painful uprooting... In Germany, England, France, America, and finally Switzerland, Nabokov from the age of 20 sought to carry on the great pre-Soviet tradition of 'advanced' art and free imagination." While struggling to survive in adverse conditions, Nabokov continued to produce "the novels that made him famous as "Sirin" to Russian readers and attacking every "cliche," his favorite enemy, in the melting of culture and politics" and, as Kazin adds, "Nabokov's ruling faith as an artist was his hatred of the expected, of "mediocrity," of that self-satisfaction in shoddy goods that more and more passes in American education and culture."
Quoting Nabokov's Van Veen (Ada): "For him the written word existed only in its abstract purity, in its unrepeatable appeal to an equally ideal mind. It belonged solely to its creator and could not be spoken of or enacted by a mime without letting the deadly stab of another's mind destroy the artist in the very lair of his art," Kazin concludes that the dangers of suffering under the "deadly stab of another's mind" would be "something that the lordly Nabokov certainly resisted. He not so much rejected as mentally obliterated (he thought) Freud, Faulkner, Conrad, Camus, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn-not to forget much of Dostoevsky! Nabokov was conceited enough to put down Einstein..." Kazin notes that Nabokov's onslaughts against writers often seem " funny and very Russian" He adds: "Nabokov was never more Russian, in gamesmanship and argumentativeness, more perky, mocking, mischievous and excessive, than in the zeal he brought to winning over his contemporaries. He loved to put others down as 'frauds' or-most destructive! - 'not important.'. Often enough he was right." According to Kazin, Nabokov "had an old Russian belief that the function of art is to open minds, to clear the air, to strip ourselves of all intellectual weakness."
Nabokov was working "against the grain, against the century, in pursuit of a beautiful private ideal that he hauntingly associated with a homesickness beyond repair..." although Kazin held that it was Nabokov's taste for "parody and intellectual 'leaps,' " that which "stunned the reader into more admiration of (his) abilities than of his novels." For the critic, Nabokovian technical wizardry, related to modernism, would make a book, like Ada, "a brilliant bore," whereas "much of his work is more that of a virtuoso than of an enchanter." In his concluding words, Alfred Kazin praises Nabokov's prodigious talent, sense of things and power of imagination which he had "enjoyed as his natural right. His long exile certainly helped. The emigration, he once said, was the only freedom that Russian writers ever have known."
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