American outsider …

… Opinion | Vladimir Nabokov, Literary Refugee - The New York Times. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Generally politics left him indifferent. He did not issue political statements. Nor did he vote. Nabokov claimed not to be able to distinguish a Republican from a Democrat. At the same time, certain things were unforgivable. In a Wellesley classroom he could not avoid stressing that Communism and totalitarianism had stunted Russian literature for a quarter-century. (Stalin had just become an American ally. Nabokov’s contract was not renewed.) The New Yorker would reject a section of his 1957 novel, “Pnin,” deemed unacceptably anti-Soviet. Nabokov could reconcile himself to a new country and a new language, to a confiscated past and a hijacked future. But he could not abide the suggestion that “Communism was an attractive new revolutionary experiment.” Nor would he for a minute forget murderous regimes, brutes, bullies, bigots or philistines of any kind.