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PARTISAN REVIEW
drew Nabokov to Chekhov was their shared aversion to literary con–
ventions and stereotypes of all kinds ; the roots of their respective
artistic methods in biological sciences , with the concomitant habit of
precise observation and recording of reality; and their very similar
political outlook.
Nabokov's political creed, enunciated in his 1964
Playboy
inter–
view, "Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art," is
in its essence identical with Chekhov's personal credo stated in his
frequently quoted 1888 letter to Alexei Pleshcheyev. Trite and self–
evident as these basic freedoms may appear in today's Western
democracies, how many Russian writers, from Pushkin to
Solzhenitsyn (let alone Soviet writers) have ever regarded them as
basic priorities? Nabokov may get a few details wrong in his bio–
graphical sketch of Chekhov, but his loving dissections of two of
Chekhov's great stories, "The Lady with the Little Dog" and " In
the Ravine," testify to his deep understanding and appreciation of
the writer he once called "my predecessor."
The American novelist Edmund White has pointed out in his
perceptive essay on Nabokov, "The Esthetics of Bliss," that appre–
ciation of Nabokov did not come easy to American readers because
"Americans have seldom felt at ease with literary art. They have
wanted it to be uplifting and 'activist.' They have expected books to
be thermometers, taking the temperature of the
Zeitgeist-or
at least
battle reports from the front lines of a beleaguered ego. " In teaching
young Americans about the succession of great writers of whom he
was the ultimate heir, in showing them how to read literature as lit–
erature , Vladimir Nabokov was also pointing out exactly where the
insistence on message and uplift over art have led one of the great
literatures of modern times.
