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.
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?
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Idk about any of his works but anyone who shits on Focault or Sartre are worthy of my respect
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Read “Pale Fire”, it's a great novel.
I found it to be much better than “Lolita” and definitely 100 times more comfortable to read.
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!lgbt !cuteandvalid pale fire has hot steamy royal court yaoi in it
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So a bunch of spoilers ahead.
The novel is a poem review.
The poem was written by John Shade, a fictional American University English Lit professor.
So the reviewer presents himself as “Charles Kimbote”, there's a presentation, the poem then the commentary. The poem is John Shade narrating his life up to a heart attack, believing he saw a “tall white fountain”, he feels hopeful after another woman who suffered from a NDE says she had the same vision on the newspaper only the discover the vision was different so he ends up disappointed and believes there's no afterlife.
Then there's the commentary, throughout it we discover Kinbote is not a professional critic but a total schizo with no self-awareness, he teaches at the same Uni as Shade and stalked him for months before Shades's death (the poem reviewed is Shade's last). In parallel Kinbote tells us the story of the King of Zembla (a fictional country in Eastern Europe where the King was deposed and the revolutionaries want him dead) and a clumsy assassin sent to kill him (he's the supposed fabulous King of Zembla who was also a homosexual with twink servants and who becomes obsessed with John Shade from the moment he arrived at the Uni).
!bookworms
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By the way, "the northern caves" by Nostalgebraist is the best book about a fictional book IMO. I've never so wanted to read it (the fictional thing).
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Didn't Kinbote pressure Shade's widow to grant him sole publishing rights to the poem immediately after he died, which he paints as a noble thing since no one else would be able to annotate it as accurately as him? He's probably the best unreliable narrator ever, the bits where the poem talks about Shade's deceased daughter and he's like "Yeah, this is actually about me" are great:
The annotation:
lmao
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That's what he claims but it doesn't make sense considering Shade's wife hated him. It's more likely Kinbote is writing his commentary from a psych ward lmao.
He was soo self-absorbed he made the entire thing about him. Kinbote and Humbert Humbert from Lolita share that in common, they're so full of themselves they're unable to gasp what other people feel or think, both of them try to portray themselves as good guys while failing miserably showing how unhinged they're without realizing it.
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Okay, I'm sold!
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By the way, the poem is the one K recited in Blade Runner.
“Within cells interlinked, a tall white fountain played”
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Incels. Inner-linked.
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Do they keep you in a little box?
'Cels.
Do you dream about working for free?
With incels interlinked.
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I'll explain the joke. The book is in two halves: the fictional poem and then the commentary by the author's "friend" as the commentary goes on it becomes longer and longer and increasingly unhinged and unrelated to the poem. It's basically two stories
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Naming my account afterBotkin continues to pay dividends a gay schizo that hallucinates and runs off with his muse's final works is pretty dramatic
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Pale Fire is amazing.
@KingofZembla discuss
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Freud, too
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Freud wrote bullshit but at least it's fun, memeable bullshit.
If you disagree you secretly want to frick your mom
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