I hate Nabokov.

Admittedly, it’s not a well-informed hatred. I’ve read only one book of his (Pale Fire) and a couple of stories, and I know very little about his life. But in my mind, at least, he has come to personify an aesthetic I despise: form without substance, “art for art’s sake,” literature disconnected from life.

He reminds me of those members of Russian “high society” so brilliantly satirized in War & Peace, people like Anna Pavlovna and Prince Vasili, who are “concerned only about phantoms and reflections of real life.” Enamored of formal beauty, they neglect truth. Thus Tolstoy’s description of the way Prince Vasili reads aloud at parties: “The art of his reading was supposed to lie in rolling out the words, quite independently of their meaning…”

As much as I may share Prince Vasili’s, and Nabokov’s, sheer delight in the sounds of words—as much as I admire fine phrases, images, fictions, fantasies—I reject any aesthetic that stops here. Beauty, if disconnected from Truth and Goodness, becomes hollow. Pale Fire, to me, was as fleetingly pleasant, and as insubstantial, as cotton candy.

To be clear, I’m not at all disparaging fiction or fantasy as such. A good novel is more truthful than a mediocre “true story”; surrealism, done well, might tell us more about reality than realism. What I hate is unabashed escapism: aesthetic “flight” from the world. Art—including fantasies and fairy tales—is not a way out from, but a way into, reality.

Which is why I have found War & Peace so invigorating. Tolstoy blends fiction with history, science, and philosophy; he makes bold assertions about what’s true and what’s false; he moves freely from biting irony to wholehearted sincerity; he airs a variety of opinions and perspectives but makes no bones about his own convictions. Take this passage, for example, on the supposed “greatness” of Napoleon:

“…when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of ‘greatness.’ ‘Greatness,’ it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the ‘great’ man nothing is wrong … And it occurs to no one that to acknowledge a greatness not commensurate with the standard of right and wrong is merely to admit one’s own nothingness and immeasurable meanness. For us, with the standard of good and evil given us by Christ, no human actions are incommensurable. And there is no greatness there where simplicity, goodness, and truth are absent.”

Simplicity, goodness, and truth! Take that, Nabokov.*

*In the interest of pursuing truth and not being a hypocrite, I should probably learn more about the real Nabokov. But I mean, the man hated on Dostoevsky; does this alone not disqualify him as an arbiter of literary merit?