In Lectures on Russian Lit, VN apparently says:
Let me refer to one more method of dealing with literature---and this is the simplest and perhaps the most important one. If you hate a book, you still may derive artistic delight from imagining other and better ways of looking at things, or, what is the same, expressing things, than the author you hate does.
I came across the quote in Omry Ronen's "Emulation, Anti-Parody, Intertextuality, and Annotation," Nabokov Studies 98/99.
It would explain in part why VN bothered to read works that he hated.
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