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say, Malevich, Kandinsky, or, to choose a more representational
artist, Chagall?
I prefer the experimental decade that coincided with my
boyhood-- Sornov, Benois (Peter Ustinov's uncle, you know),
Vrubel, Dobuzhinski, etc. Malevich and Kandinsky mean nothing
to me and I have always found Chagall's stuff intolerably
primitive and grotesque.
Always?
Well, relatively early works such as The Green Jew
and The Promenade have their points, but the frescoes
and windows he now contributes to temples and the Parisian
Opera House plafond are coarse' and unbearable.
What of Tchelitchew, whose Hide and Seek
(another version of Speak, Memory's Find What the Sailor
Has Hidden?^ inpart describes the experience of reading one
of your novels? I know Tchelitchew's work very little.
The latter artist recalls the Ballets Russes. Were you
at all acquainted with that circle, painters as well as dancers
and musicians?
My parents had many acquaintances who painted and danced
and made music. Our house was one of the first where young
Shalyapin sang, and I have foxtrotted with Pavlova in London
half a century ago.
Mr. Hilton Kramer, in a recent article in the
Sunday New York Times (May 3, 1970) writes, "The
accomplishments of at least two living artists who are widely
regarded as among the greatest of their time-- George
Balanchine and Vladimir Nabokov-- are traceable, despite the
changes of venue and language and outlook, to the esthetic
dream that nourished Diaghilev and the artists he gathered
around him in St. Petersburg in the nineties. " This is, I
suppose, what Mary McCarthy meant when she characterized