''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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times cruel. "21 L. L. Lee, on the other hand, defends
Fyodor, stating that "he does appreciate Chernyshevs-
ki's risks, his courage, and, for that matter, his
goodness"22, and that his work "makes Chernyshevski
a truly sympathetic, if foolish, man and rescues him
from politics in the sense that he becomes human and
not a symbol. " 23
What is more interesting in this context, however,
is the way in which Nabokov treats, not Chernyshevskii
the man, but his theory of art. As one biographer says
of Chernyshevskii: ".:. [he] denied serious attention
to any theory of art or criticism that confined dis-
cussion to the relative merits of works of art and
avoided more fundamental questions. "24 Concerning
himself with such "fundamental questions", Chernyshevs-
kii decided that the "mission" of art was "to repro-
duce, to explain, to judge, and to teach. "25 Briefly
and simply stated, this implies that art should re-
produce reality, which he considered as superior to
art.
26
By calling attention to objects through repro-
ducing them, art could fulfil its function to explain,
by making these objects' significance clear and
"[: forcing] people to understand life better. " - "Though
art might resemble a learned statement, it would
more easily be absorbed and comprehended. " 27
Chernyshevskii's conviction that art had the func-
tion to judge entailed his "theory of art's social
mission. "28 He expected that, if a writer was aware
of, and alive to, what was going on around him, "then
consciously or not, his work pronounced judgements