My «most serious failure», according to Mr. Wilson, «is one of interpretation». Had he read my commentary with more attention he would have seen that I do not believe in any kind of «interpretation» so that his or my «interpretation» can be neither a failure nor a success. In other words, I do not believe in the old-fashioned, naive, and musty method of human-interest criticism championed by Mr. Wilson that consists of removing the characters from an author's imaginary world to the imaginary, but generally far less plausible, world of the critic who then proceeds to examine these displaced characters as if they were «real people». In my commentary I have given examples and made some innocent fun of such criticism (steering clear, however, of any allusion to Mr. Wilson's extraordinary misconceptions in The Triple Thinkers).
I have also demonstrated the factual effect of Pushkin's characterizations as related to the structure of the poem. There are certain inconsistencies in his treatment of his hero which are especially evident, and in a way especially attractive, in the beginning of Canto Six. In a note to Six: xxviii: 7, I stress the uncanny, dreamlike quality of Onegin's behavior just before and during the duel. It is purely a question of architectonics — not of personal interpretation. My facts are objective and irrefutable. I remain with Pushkin in Pushkin's world. I am not concerned with Onegin's being gentle or cruel, energetic or indolent, kind or unkind («you are simply very kindhearted», says a woman to him quoted in his diary; he is «zloy, unkind», says Mr. Wilson); I am concerned only with Pushkin's overlooking, in the interest of the plot, that Onegin, who according to Pushkin is a punctilious home du monde and an experienced duelist, would hardly choose a servant for second or shoot to kill in the kind of humdrum affair where vanity is amply satisfied by sustaining one's adversary's fire without returning it.
The actual cause of the encounter is however quite plausible in Pushkin: upon finding himself at a huge vulgar feast (Five: xxxi) so unlike the informal party promised him by Lenski (Four: xlix), Onegin is quite right to be furious with his deceitful or scatterbrained young friend, just as Lenski is quite justified in calling him out for flirting with Olga. Onegin accepts the challenge instead of laughing it off as he would have done if Lenski had chosen a less pedantic second. Pushkin stresses the fact that Onegin sincerely loves the youth but that amour propre is sometimes stronger than friendship. That is all. One should stick to that and not try to think up «deep» variations which are not even new; for what Mr. Wilson inflicts upon me, in teaching me how to understand Onegin, is the old solemn nonsense of Onegin's hating and envying Lenski for being capable of idealism, devoted love, ecstatic German romanticism and the like «when he himself is so sterile and empty». Actually, it is just as easy, and just as irrelevant (yet more fashionable — Mr. Wilson is behind the times), to argue that Onegin, not Lenski, is the true idealist, that he loathes Lenski because he perceives in him the tuture tat swinish squire Lenski is doomed to become, and so he raises slowly his pistol and . . , but Lenski in malignant cold blood is also raising his pistol, and God knows who would have killed whom had not the author followed wisely the old rule of sparing one's more interesting character while the novel is still developing. If anybody takes «a mean advantage», as Mr. Wilson absurdly puts it (none of the principals can derive any special «advantage» in a duel a volonte), it is not Onegin, but Pushkin.
So much for my «most serious failure».
All that now remains to be examined is Mr. Wilson's concern for reputations — Pushkin's reputation as a linguist and the reputations of SainteBeuve and others as writers.
With an intensity of feeling that he shares with Russian monolinguists who have debated the subject, Mr. Wilson scolds me for underrating Pushkin's knowledge of English and «quite disregarding the evidence». I supply the evidence, not Mr. Wilson, not Sidorov, and not even Pushkin's own father (a cocky old party who maintained that his son used to speak fluent Spanish, let alone English). Had Mr. Wilson carefully consulted my notes to One: xxxvni: 9, he would have convinced himself that I prove with absolute certainty that neither in 1821, nor 1833, nor 1836, was Pushkin able to understand simple English phrases. My demonstration remains unassailable, and it is this evidence that Mr. Wilson disregards while referring me to stale generalities or to an idiotic anecdote about the Raevski girls' giving Pushkin lessons in English in a Crimean bower. Mr. Wilson knows nothing about the question. He is not even aware that Pushkin got the style of his «Byronic» tales from Pichot and Zhukovski, or that Pushkin's copying out extracts from foreign writers means nothing. Mr. Wilson, too, may have copied extracts, and we see the results. He complains I do not want to admit that Pushkin's competence in languages was considerable, but I can only reply that Mr. Wilson's notion ot such competence and my notion of it are completely dissimilar. I realize, of course, that my friend has a vested interest in the matter, but I can assure him that although Pushkin spoke excellent eighteenth-century French, he had only a gentleman's smattering of other foreign languages.
Finally — Mr. Wilson is horrified by my «instinct to take digs at great reputations». Well, it cannot be helped; Mr. Wilson must accept my instinct, and wait for the next crash. I refuse to be guided and controlled by a communion of established views and academic traditions, as he wants me to be. What right has he to prevent me from finding mediocre and overrated people like Balzac, Dostoevski, SainteBeuve, or Stendhal, that pet of all those who like their French plain? How much has Mr. Wilson enjoyed Mme. de StaeTs novels? Has he ever studied Balzac's absurdities and Stendhal's cliches? Has he examined the melodramatic muddle and phony mysticism of Dostoevski? Can he really venerate that archvulgarian, SainteBeuve? And why should I be forbidden to consider that Chaykovski's hideous and insulting libretto is not saved by a music whose cloying banalities have pursued me ever since I was a curlyhaired boy in a velvet box? If 1 am allowed to display my very special and very subjective admiration for Pushkin, Browning, Krylov, Chateaubriand, Griboedov, Senancour, Kuchelbccker, Keats, Hodascvich, to name only a few of those I praise in my notes, I should be also allowed to bolster and circumscribe that praise by pointing out to the reader my favorite bogeys and shams in the hall of false fame.
In his rejoinder to my letter of August 26, 1965, in The New York Review, Mr. Wilson says that on rereading his article he felt it sounded «more damaging» than he had meant it to he. His article, entirely consisting, as I have shown, of quibbles and blunders, can be damaging only to his own reputation — and that is the last look I shall ever take at the dismal scene.
Completed on January 20, 1966, and published in February of that year in Encounter. One or two forced peeps did come after that «last look». The essay was reprinted in Nabokov's Congeries, Viking, New York, 1968.
LOLITA AND MR. GIRODIAS
From time to time, in the course of the 1960s, there have appeared, over the signature of Mr. Girodias or that of some friend of his, retrospective notes pertaining to the publication of Lolita by The Olympia Press and to various phases of our «strained relations». Those frivolous reminiscences invariably contained factual errors, which I generally took the trouble to point out in brief rejoinders; whereupon, as I detected with satisfaction, certain undulatory motions of retreat were performed by our flexible memoirist. An especially ambitious article, with especially serious misstatements, has now been published by him twice — in Barney Rosset's Evergreen Review (No. 37, September 1965) under the title «Lolita, Nabokov, and I», and in his own anthology (The Olympia Reader, Grove Press, New York, 1965) under the less elegant title of «A Sad, Ungraceful History of Lolita». Since I have religiously preserved all my correspondence with Mr. Girodias, I am able,I trust, to induce a final retraction on his part.