Vladimir Nabokov was not a man who suffered fools, and the category of fools, in his estimation, was remarkably capacious. It included most of his fellow novelists, nearly all literary critics, every psychoanalyst who ever lived, and a substantial portion of the reading public. He was vain, imperious, mischievous, and frequently cruel. He was also, sentence for sentence, the finest prose stylist of the twentieth century in the English language—a language he adopted in his thirties, having already produced a distinguished body of work in Russian. Strong Opinions, the 1973 collection of his interviews, letters to editors, and occasional essays, is where Nabokov at his most combative and his most delightful converge. What follows is a selection of his sharpest observations, drawn from that volume and from the broader record of his public pronouncements. · 9 min read
On Style and the Art of Writing
Nabokov had no patience for writers who confused importance of subject with importance of prose. He did not believe that writing about war, poverty, or social injustice conferred any literary merit upon the writer. What mattered was the quality of the perception, the precision of the language, the architecture of the sentence. He was, in this sense, an aesthete of the most rigorous kind—not because he believed art existed in a vacuum, but because he believed that shoddy prose was itself a moral failing, a failure of attention to the world.
“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist,” he declared in one interview, deliberately inverting the expected formula. For Nabokov, the imagination was scientific in its rigor—an instrument of discovery, not of fantasy. And precision was poetic in its effects: the right word, placed in the right position, could detonate an entire landscape of meaning.
He was notorious for insisting that he wrote and rewrote on index cards, composing not from beginning to end but in fragments that he later arranged. “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing,” he said. “I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose. These bits I write on index cards until the novel is done.” This method reflected his deepest conviction about art: that a novel was not a river flowing from source to sea but a pattern, a design, a constructed object whose beauty lay in the totality of its architecture.
On the question of what constituted good writing, he was unequivocal: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.” This was partly self-deprecation (his spoken English, though perfectly fluent, retained a heavy Russian accent), but it was also a statement of hierarchy. Thinking came first; writing was the disciplined enactment of thought; speech was merely its degraded echo.
On Poshlost and Vulgarity
One of Nabokov’s most valuable contributions to critical vocabulary was his elaboration of the Russian concept of poshlost—a word that has no precise English equivalent but that encompasses, in Nabokov’s use, a particular species of spiritual vulgarity: the pretentious, the falsely important, the smugly philistine, the glorification of the mediocre.
Nabokov identified poshlost everywhere in modern culture—in advertising, in popular literature, in the pronouncements of politicians, in the hollow rituals of academic life. “Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man,” he wrote, and the remark was not merely charming; it was a declaration of war against the poshlyak, the purveyor of false significance, who would have literature serve sociology, or psychology, or politics, or any purpose other than the creation of aesthetic bliss.
He distinguished sharply between genuine emotion and sentimentality, which he regarded as the most insidious form of poshlost. Sentimentality was cheap because it demanded nothing of the reader; it offered pre-digested feelings, emotional responses that required no effort of perception or thought. True art, by contrast, demanded everything. It asked the reader to see the world afresh, to shed the comfortable habits of conventional perception, to encounter reality in all its strangeness and specificity.
On Dostoyevsky and Other Writers
No aspect of Nabokov’s critical personality has generated more controversy than his literary judgments, particularly his famous hostility toward writers whom the rest of the world considered masters. His dismissal of Dostoyevsky was not a casual opinion but a deeply held conviction that he defended with characteristic ferocity.
“Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity—all this is difficult to admire,” he wrote. He called Crime and Punishment a “wonderfully planned and executed thriller” but denied it the status of great literature. He placed Dostoyevsky far below Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, and—naturally—Pushkin, whom he venerated above all Russian writers.
He was equally devastating on other reputations. He called Thomas Mann “a tower of triviality.” He dismissed Faulkner as a writer of “corncobby chronicles.” He found Conrad’s prose style “stodgy.” Hemingway he once reduced to “a writer of books for boys.” Camus was “a compact little nonentity, compared to Tolstoy and other writers.” Sartre was contemptible. Pound was “that total fake.” These judgments were often unfair, sometimes absurd, and always entertaining. They revealed not so much the limits of Nabokov’s taste as the absoluteness of his standards: he judged every writer by the criterion of verbal mastery, and most writers, judged by that criterion alone, came up short.
The writers he loved, he loved without reservation. Flaubert was “a saint of literature.” Joyce was a genius, and Ulysses was the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Proust was sublime. Kafka was the one great German prose writer. Stevenson, Wells, Dickens—these were writers who had earned his admiration through the originality of their imaginations and the quality of their prose.
On Translation
Having lived in three languages—Russian, French, and English—Nabokov had thought more deeply about translation than most writers ever need to. His four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1964) was one of the most controversial literary undertakings of its era. He deliberately produced a literal, unrhymed, prosaic translation, accompanied by an enormous commentary that dwarfed the poem itself, on the principle that a translator’s first obligation was to accuracy, not to beauty.
“The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase,” he declared. This position brought him into a celebrated quarrel with Edmund Wilson, who had been his closest American friend and literary ally. Wilson reviewed the Onegin unfavorably; Nabokov responded with savage precision; Wilson counter-attacked; and the friendship, which had been one of the great literary friendships of the century, was destroyed. The episode revealed something essential about Nabokov: he would sacrifice any relationship, any alliance, any comfort, in defense of what he believed to be the truth about a literary question.
On Butterflies and Literature
Nabokov’s lepidoptery was not a hobby. It was a parallel vocation, pursued with the same intensity and the same passion for precision that characterized his literary work. He published scientific papers on the classification of butterflies. He spent years as a research fellow at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He made genuine contributions to the taxonomy of the Polyommatus blues, contributions that were vindicated by DNA analysis decades after his death.
“The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside,” he once claimed—and one is never entirely sure whether he was being serious, playful, or both. The connection between the two vocations was, for Nabokov, not metaphorical but structural. Both demanded the most exacting attention to detail. Both required the observer to see what was actually there, rather than what convention expected to be there. Both rewarded patience, precision, and the capacity for wonder.
On Memory and Nostalgia
Nabokov was an exile three times over—from Russia, from Europe, and from the Russian language itself. His memoir, Speak, Memory, is one of the supreme achievements of autobiographical writing, a book in which the past is recovered not through the crude machinery of chronological narrative but through the delicate operations of sensory memory: the pattern of sunlight on a tablecloth, the texture of a butterfly’s wing, the sound of rain on the roof of a country house that would soon be lost forever.
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,” he wrote in that book’s famous opening. This was not a statement of despair but of defiance. Against the abyss, Nabokov set the act of remembering—the meticulous, loving, obsessive reconstruction of a vanished world. Memory, for Nabokov, was not nostalgia. Nostalgia was a form of poshlost, a sentimental falsification of the past. True memory was something harder and rarer: the capacity to perceive, across the gulf of time, the exact texture of a lived moment, to hold it in the mind with the same precision with which one might hold a butterfly specimen in a glass case.
On Art and Reality
Nabokov rejected, with the full force of his considerable scorn, every theory of literature that subordinated art to an external purpose—social, political, psychological, or moral. He despised the very concept of “committed literature.” He had no interest in novels that set out to diagnose the ills of society or to prescribe their remedies. He regarded Freudian interpretation of literature as an obscenity.
“There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts,” he said, and the remark captures the essence of his aesthetic. Art was not an escape from reality but a heightened encounter with it. The world, seen through the eyes of a great artist, was more real, not less. The purpose of literature was not to teach, not to comfort, not to reform, but to produce in the reader what Nabokov called “aesthetic bliss”—a state of perception in which the boundaries between self and world, between observer and observed, momentarily dissolve, and the reader sees, for an instant, what the artist has seen.
This was his final and most radical claim: that the purpose of art was not representation but transfiguration. The world the artist created was not a copy of the world but a new world, governed by its own laws, answerable to its own standards, and justified only by the intensity of the pleasure it produced. Whether one accepts this claim or not, one cannot deny the force of the example. Nabokov’s own prose, at its best, achieves precisely the state he describes: a luminous precision in which every word earns its place, every image vibrates with significance, and the reader is left with the sense of having seen something that was always there but that only this particular arrangement of words could reveal.