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

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on the aspects of life that interested him.
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He puts it in a way that suggests that a work of
art may in fact contain more than the author intentionally
puts into it. His convictions and opinions
may flow into his art without him being aware of it,
so that, even though he does not write in order to
pass judgements, the judgements may be there, implicitly.
Nabokov, of course, must have known this; hence
his statements about his own novels, like the two
quoted above, which anticipate and refute any attempt
to read either conscious or unconscious judgements of
the kind that Chernyshevskii has in mind into his work.
Chernyshevskii even went a step further determining
what a writer should be interested in. Every age had
its own particular problems, on which every member of
society must necessarily have views. It was impossible
and inadmissible that an artist should not be con-
cerned with them. Chernyshevskii went so far as to
"deny the right of an artist to consider his artistic
work apart from the problems of the age. From [his]
point of view, art could not be removed from life. "30
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"Any human activity had to serve mankind", and
art was no exception. The artist neglected his duty
and "supported existing social injustice"32 if he
insisted on "pure art", removed from life's concerns.
Only if the underlying idea, the content;, was "correct",
that is, "compatible with the needs of
could a work of art be created:, for
[the]
Artistry consists in the correspondence
of form with idea; therefore to discern
the artistic value of a work, one must,
time",
33