In the “Waste Land” of Postwar Europe: Facing the Modern Condition

Abstract

In Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Gift, we find a mock endorsement of the pervasive interwar critical discourse that militated for the “document” in literature at the expense of fiction. It comes in the guise of a book review, penned purportedly by a Parisian émigré critic by the suggestive name of Christophorus Mortus:

But in our difficult times with their new responsibilities, when the very air is imbued with a subtle moral angoisse (an awareness of which is the infallible mark of “genuineness” in a contemporary poet), abstract and melodious little pieces about dreamy visions are incapable of seducing anyone. And in truth it is with a kind of joyous relief that one passes from them to any kind of “human document,” to what one can read “between the words” in certain Soviet writers (granted even without talent), to an artless and sorrowful confession, to a private letter dictated by emotion and despair.¹