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Today, Nabokov is a distant and revered personage safe in Switzerland; his judgments and comments are no less candid than ever. Along with a great many writers (see box p. 82), the informal list of his jocular pet hates includes such things as: progressive education; "serious" writers; confessions in the Dostoevskian manner; book reviewers, most of whom, Nabokov contends, "move their lips when reading"; people who say "excuse me" when they belch. Clearly, in an age practiced in the smooth piety of mock humility and slackly trained to believe that sincerity is an excuse for nearly everything, the public Nabokov must appear as some kind of cultural curmudgeon.
His views on what he regards as the two principal scourges of the century —Communism and Freudianism—are staunch. Nabokov sees both as dreadful infringements upon creative freedom. "The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me," he says. "My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones or played in theaters."
Baconian Acrostics
Nabokov's novels, prefaces and discourses drip with scathing references to Freud. His basic objection to Freudian theories is that they slight the creative imagination by putting it in a sexual straitjacket and by insisting that dreams and images are determined mechanistically. "I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud," he writes, "with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying from their natural nooks upon the love life of their parents." Nabokov may yet get his wish to see Shakespeare in heaven, laughing at Freud (in hell, naturally) for his bad interpretations of Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth. But how much comfort the scene would give him is debatable. From Nabokov's point of view, the electrical and chemical control of the brain, which seems to be rendering Freudian theory irrelevant, will hardly help the freedom of the individual imagination.
He has, as the phrase goes, no time for religion; yet his work is infused with a poetic sense of the sanctity of all life and with the faculty of a primitive animist—vestigial in modern man —of investing inanimate objects with life. He is inclined to deny that any utility, morality or heavy philosophical meaning should be attributed to his art. He dismisses such suggestions with the same scorn that he once made use of when a clubwoman asked him what butterflies were for. Nevertheless, certain deductions can be drawn from Nabokov's writing. In Bend Sinister, he composed a picture of crude, lumpish evil-in-power, and he put Yeats' much quoted "rough beast" into a Bolshevik or Nazi Bethlehem. Thus Prospero-Nabokov always knew Caliban, whether he was known as Hitler or Stalin or by some other name.
Still, the label that in one sense best suits Nabokov's practice and precept as a writer is art for art's sake. It is a