Based Nabokov mean reviews and recommendations

https://lithub.com/the-meanest-things-vladimir-nabokov-said-about-other-writers/

https://wmjas.wikidot.com/nabokov-s-recommendations

!bookworms !classics come check this out

Plato. Not particularly fond of him.

Lmao

Freud, Sigmund. A figure of fun. Loathe him. Vile deceit. Freudian interpretation of dreams is charlatanic, and satanic, nonsense.

Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind? I may have aired this before but I'd like to repeat that I detest not one but four doctors: Dr. Freud, Dr. Zhivago, Dr. Schweitzer, and Dr. Castro. Of course, the first takes the fig, as the fellows say in the dissecting-room. I've no intention to dream the drab middle-class dreams of an Austrian crank with a shabby umbrella. . . . The Freudian racket looks to me as much of a farce as the jumbo thingum of polished wood with a polished hole in the middle which doesn't represent anything except the gaping face of the Philistine who is told it is a great sculpture produced by the greatest living caveman.

Also @JimieWhales someone agrees with you on Hemingway and Conrad

Hemingway is certainly the better of the two; he has at least a voice of his own and is responsible for that delightful, highly artistic short story, “The Killers.” And the description of the iridescent fish and rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is superb. But I cannot abide Conrad's souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist clichés. In neither of those two writers can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile, and the same can be said of some other beloved authors, the pets of the common room, the consolation and support of graduate students, such as—but some are still alive, and I hate to hurt living old boys while the dead ones are not yet buried.

Or

As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 40s, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

Then on Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A prophet, a claptrap journ*list and a slapdash comedian. Some of his scenes are extraordinarily amusing. Nobody takes his reactionary journ*lism seriously.

The Double. His best work, though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's "Nose."

The Brothers Karamazov. Dislike it intensely.

Crime and Punishment. Dislike it intensely. Ghastly rigmarole.

Then Camus, Sastre and Faulkner

Faulkner, William. Dislike him. Writer of corncobby chronicles. To consider them masterpieces is an absurd delusion. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me.

>Camus, Albert. Dislike him. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me. Awful.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Even more awful than Camus. Nausea. Second-rate. A tense-looking but really very loose type of writing.

on the last one, but I like Camus.

What about the authors he likes?

He likes James Joyce, Kafka, Tolstoy, Borges and Bely.

He names “Ulysses”, “The Metamorphosis” and “Petersburg” as the greatest pieces of literature of the 20th century. “Petersburg” looks quite interesting by the way.

Pasternak, Boris. An excellent poet, but a poor novelist.

Doctor Zhivago. Detest it. Melodramatic and vilely written. To consider it a masterpiece is an absurd delusion. Pro-Bolshevist, historically false. A sorry thing, clumsy, trivial, melodramatic, with stock situations and trite coincidences.

!anticommunists thoughts on Dr. Zhivago? Even if only the movie?