runs

[Malignd]

<<Right.  I think he liked to be provocative, and was
thus prone to making absurd statements like that
one.>>

I'm not sure this is exactly right.

Again, with Nabokov, there is always a level of irony
or game-playing, so one can't be sure, but his
literary opinions were very strong and often
unorthodox.  I don't think he was provocative for the
sake of it, because he was consistent.

He thought Dostoyevsky was not good, said that often;
similarly Gorky.  But he admired Tolstoy, Gogol,
Pushkin.  

Didn't like Mann; liked Robbe-Grillet.  Thought highly
of Ulysses, didn't like Finnegans Wake or Portrait of
the Artist.

Loathed Freud.  

Thought the greatest novels of the century were The
Metamorphosis, Ulysses, In Search of Lost Time, St.
Petersburg.


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