Был ли Набоков литературным женоненавистником?

Abstract

Was Nabokov a literary misogynist? The essay explores Nabokov's attitude toward women authors as expressed in his fictional, discursive and epistolary writings. As we know from Nabokov's correspondence, in the early 1930s he was particularly interested in what one might call "gender-response criticism" and read many works by contemporary female authors. Three main topics are considered. First, the author examines Nabokov's comments on and reviews of works by Russian émigré female writers, including Ekaterina Bakunina, Nina Berberova, Irina Odoevceva, and Marina Cvetaeva and others. Second, he inquires into Nabokov's very negative reactions to twentieth-century Western female authors, and especially to such English writers as Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Third, at the heart of the paper lies an analysis of two short works of fiction, the satirical Admiralty Spire (1933) and the feuilletonistic A Slice of Life (1935). Reminiscent of Nabokov's scathing reviews of female novelists and poets, Admiralty Spire bridges his poetics and his biography. While among the least successful of Nabokov's works, A Slice of Life is important as Nabokov's only experiment with creating a female narrator. Possibly explaining why Nabokov considered Woolf's Orlando an example of first-rate pošlost', both stories also playfully debunk the conventional distinctions among such notions as "a female author", "a female persona", and "a female voice/narrator".