Ingmar Bergman

[Mr Sausage]

Yes, it was Sergey I was thinking of, but also a young gay Swedish poet the Nabokovs befriended in Montreaux whose name escapes me. I remember Stacey Schiff in her biography of Véra writing how the pair tried to convince her not only to abandon poetry for prose (like Vladimir) but also give up her own homosexuality, which they disapproved of.

Nothing with Nabokov is ever simple. But maybe I would’ve been better off using his odd sexism as an example. He was an incisive critic of misogyny in all its forms, and yet had no trouble dismissing “lady novelists”, for example, among whom he included Jane Austen! Although he did end up admitting (somewhat begrudgingly) the excellence of Mansfield Park, traces of that condescension can be found even in his lectures on the novel in Lectures on Literature.