Critical illusions: Anti-criticism in Vladimir Nabokov

The subject of the following article is "anti-criticism." The term is my coinage and means, in a nutshell, the expression by artists of an aggressively negative understanding of scholarly, academic criticism. The article is divided into an introduction and two sections. In "Criticism and Anti-Criticism in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire and Eugene Onegin" I look at representations of literary criticism in Pale Fire and the commentary to Eugene Onegin, in the context of Nabokov's philosophy of art and life as expressed in these and other works (Lolita, Ada or Ardor, Speak, Memory, essays and interviews). In "Anti-Criticism as a Practice Which Originates in the Early Renaissance" Nabokov is situated in a broader historical context. I provide a brief outline of the development of anti-criticism from the 14^th to the 19^th century, providing examples from Cervantes, Sterne, and Flaubert and pointing to similarities between them and Nabokov.