The Meanest Things Vladimir Nabokov Said About Other Writers / Emily Temple in: LitHub April 20, 2018

Vladimir Nabokov was an unusually opinionated man—particularly when it came to literature. His own, primarily—when asked about the function of his editor, he sniffed, “By ‘editor’ I suppose you mean proofreader”—but as a close second (what else could it be): everybody else’s. In interviews, he seemed to delight in airing his grievances about other writers’ work, especially when he considered them unfairly beloved by the public.
Reading his complaints half a century later, I have to say, I delight in them too. At a time when the literary world seems determined to swear that every book is Good because it is a Book, Nabokov’s outspoken anti-book opinions feel almost ecstatically transgressive. Well, I suppose no one was around to drag him on Twitter for daring to speak his mind; he had no real fears that a bad review would hang around to haunt his career or block him from getting a coveted blurb. And as far as feuds go, though Nabokov certainly had his own legendary battle, I think of him as being so haughty and aggressively dignified that I imagine his body would have actually repelled the spit of any disgruntled, badly reviewed writer who might have chosen to approach him.
Still, there was some contemporaneous pearl-clutching at Nabokov’s loose tongue. In a 1966 essay responding to his critics, chiefly his ex-best friend Edmund Wilson (alluded to above), Nabokov wrote:

Mr. Wilson is horrified by my “instinct to take digs at great reputations.” Well, it cannot be helped; Mr. Wilson must accept my instinct, and wait for the next crash. I refuse to be guided and controlled by a communion of established views and academic traditions, as he wants me to be. What right has he to prevent me from finding mediocre and overrated people like Balzac, Dostoevski, Sainte-Beuve, or Stendhal, the pet of all those who like their French plain? . . . If I am allowed to display my very special and very subjective admiration for Pushkin, Browning, Krylov, Chateaubriand, Griboedov, Senancour, Küchelbecker, Keats, Hodasevich, to name only a few of those I praise in my notes, I should be also allowed to bolster and circumscribe that praise by pointing out to the reader my favorite bogeys and shams in the hall of false fame. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-meanest-things-vladimir-nabokov-said-about-other-writers/