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Jul. 14th, 2025 04:37 pmI never meant to deny the moral impact of art which is certainly inherent in every genuine work of art. What I do deny and prepared to fight to the last drop of my ink is the deliberate moralizing which to me kills every vestige of art in a work however skillfully written. There is a deep morality in the Overcoat which I have tried to convey in my book, but this morality has nothing to do with the cheap political propaganda which some overzealous admirers in nineteenth century Russia has tried to squeeze out of, or rather into it, and which, in my opinion does violence to the story and to the very notion of art. … In my opinion the fact that The Kreuzer Sonata and The Power of Darkness were written with a deliberate moral purpose largely defeats their purpose, killing the inherent morality of uninhibited art (Nabokov, a letter to R.G. Noyes, 1945).
