VLADIMIR NABOKOV
33
and neither Racine nor Moliere the playwrights were yet on the
scene.
In Italy, in an age of oppression and tyranny beginning in the
middle of the sixteenth century, with all thought under suspicion and
all expression of thought fettered, the decade we are discussing is
one of inflated poetry with nothing worth mentioning beyond the
extravagant metaphors and far-fetched conceits of Giovanni Marini
and his followers. Torquato Tasso, the poet, had completed his tragi–
cally botched life ten years before, and Giordano Bruno, the great
independent thinker, had just been burnt at the stake
(1600).
As for Germany, no great writers are present during the decade
under discussion, which corresponds to the threshold of the so-called
German Renaissance
(1600-1740).
French literature was strongly
influencing various minor poets, and there were numerous literary
societies modeled on Italian ones.
In Russia between the fiery pamphlets ofIvan the Terrible, end
of the sixteenth century, and the birth of the greatest of all Muscovite
writers (before the nineteenth-century Renaissance), the Archpriest
Avvakum
(1620-1681),
all we can distinguish in a protracted era of
oppression and isolation are anonymous fairy tales, narrated un–
rhymed poems intoned by reciters singing the exploits of legendary
heroes (the oldest text of these Bwilinas was written down in
1620
for
an Englishman, Richard James). In Russia , as in Germany, litera–
ture was still fetal.
The General Comments of Critics
Some critics, a very vague minority long dead, have tried to
prove that
Don Quixote
is but a stale farce. Others have maintained
that
Don Quixote
is the greatest novel ever written. A hundred years
ago one enthusiastic French critic, Sainte-Beuve , called it "the Bible
of Humanity." Let us not fall under the spell of these enchanters.
The translator Samuel Putnam in the Viking edition recom–
mends books by Bell and by Krutch on
Don Quixote.
*
I strongly
object to many things in those books. I object to such statements as
"[the] perception [of Cervantes] was as sensitive, his mind as sup-
'The following three quotations are drawn from Aubrey
F.
C. Bell,
Cervantes
( orman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947).
