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tioned, during that brief interval of about a quarter of a century
when Russian culture temporarily freed itself from the utilitarianism
that dominated it in the second half of the nineteenth century and
that, in the words of the foremost prerevolutionary theoretician of
Russian Marxism, George Plekhanov, saw the task of the critic or
teacher of literature as "translating a literary work from the lan–
guage of art into the language of the social sciences."
It
was a tradi–
tion of disregarding the quality of literary language, of mistrusting
originality and brilliance, of ignoring the form of literary works, of
ignoring everything except the writer's "politically correct" attitude
to issues of contemporary relevance. Anton Chekhov rebelled
against this in the 1890s, when he wrote that "the novelist interested
in art should pass over everything that is of only temporary signifi–
cance." Chekhov's view, heretical and scandalous at the end of the
nineteenth century, became the norm for most Russian writers
active during the first two decades of this century.
As Nabokov eloquently explains in his lecture on "Russian
Writers, Censors, and Readers," the utilitarian dictatorship over lit–
erature assumed a much more dire aspect in Soviet times than it
ever had before the revolution, combining the worst features of
tsarist censorship with the prescriptive demands of nineteenth–
century radical dissent. His research in the 1930s for the detailed
biography of one of the originators of radical-utilitarian control over
literature, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, which forms the fourth chapter of
The Gift,
must have further convinced Nabokov that the only way to
understand the essence of a work of literary art is "for literary criti–
cism to discard its sociological, religious, philosophical and other
textbooks, which only help mediocrity to admire itself.
In
his interviews, autobiographies, and letters to Edmund
Wilson, Nabokov had many interesting things to say about the
twentieth-century Russian writers whose work he valued, such as
Ivan Bunin, Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, and a few others. But his
lectures, except for a brief section on Maxim Gorky (much of it
paraphrased from Roskin's book), deal with four great nineteenth–
century figures: Turgenev , Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov (the·
Gogol lecture is a reprint of a portion of Nabokov's 1944 book
Nikolai Gogo!:).
Ivan Turgenev did not, to Nabokov's mind, belong in
the same league with Gogol, Tolstoy, or Chekhov. He was for him
"not a great writer, though a very pleasant one." Nabokov found
errors in Turgenev's much-admired nature descriptions and faulted
