User:Dybryd/Sandbox/Nabokov

Censorship

Boyd, the American Years

page 32

One constant theme whenever Nabokov lectured on Russian literature was the censorship from the right under the tsars and the censorship from the left under the radicals of the 1840s and 1860s and their despotic descendants in the Soviet Union. As in the creative writing course, where he exhorted his students to defy the American tyranny of the market place, Nabokov made his lectures a plea for the right of artists to accept no dictates but their own artistic consciences.

page 255

December 1953: Nabokov dined with Pascal Covici of Viking Press and handed over his manuscript. A month later, back in Ithaca, he received the verdict: the book was brilliant, but a publisher who took it on would risk a fine or jail. He sent it straight on to Simon and Schuster.

(His contract with the New Yorker gave them the right of first refusal on everything he wrote, but) before he would let Katharine White see the novel, he sought reassurance that she could decide on the manuscript without anybody else but her husband, E.B. White, setting eyes on it. Or if someone else had to read it, could its authorship be concealed from him or her? Nabokov did not even want to entrust his text to the mails: if Katharine White felt she must read it, he would have to bring it to New York himself. [...] He also asked if she thought it likely he could preserve his anonymity once the book was published. No, she replied: from her experience, an author's identity sooner or later leaked out.

page 662

He was rehabilitated in the Soviet Union in July 1986, at first tentatively and then in a rush: by 1988 even Invitation to a Beheading and The Gift were available to Soviet Readers, albeit at first in texts with some politically sensitive passages suppressed. Nabokov came to be regarded officially as a national treasure. [...] He became so popular that he was jokingly referred to as "the writer of Perestroika."

Selected Letters, 1940-1977

page 222

(to Maurice Girodias, August 3 1957)

The situation here is extremely delicate. Doubleday have chose the passages from LOLITA for the Anchor Review, who in two instances made them change their choice of text. These lawyers have now been consulted as to the prospects of a complete edition; they have advised against it for the present. As you probably know, the Supreme Court has just handed down some very disappointing decisions. Although the cases judged were far removed from LOLITA's case, the important thing is that the Court did not bother with the definition of the term "obscenity", and did not take any measures against local censorship. This means that any small-town postmaster can set in motion the machine of censorship, starting the case on its way from Court to Court, until it reached the Supreme Court, which probably (though by no means certainly) would exonerate my book.