“Certain Normal Predicaments of Human Divinity”

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Vladimir Nabokov did not like the novel of ideas. He made that known. Artists, great ones too, often have their idiosyncratic dislikes, usually contrary expressions of the unique aesthetic vision that drives their own work. Particularly, Nabokov did not like the work of those monuments of great-idea novels, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Thomas Mann, though the…