Chris,
I still don't see your point.
Nabokov, if anything, was an "aristocrat" in his make-up... extremely anti-communist, extremely pro-American politically, a supporter of the Vietnam war, and yet an anti-racist through and through, and full of blind-spots concerning sexuality. But what is the point here?
Your only contributions to the discussion were the following.
Chris wrote: Meh, Nabokov was just a dick, making up stories about how he was descended from Genghis Khan and whatnot. Oh, and his translation of Alice in Wonderland sucks too.
Chris wrote later: His translation of Alice (Alisya v strane chudes) does suck though, and it is what he is most known for in Russia. His Genghis comments (see Orlando Figes' book Natasha's Dance) are part of an old strategy in Russia of establishing your antiquity and nobility. It's an elite thing.
Now calling Nabokov a dick, is not what I would call an intellectual intervention into a discussion on aesthetics.
As far as Orlando Figes book is concerned, he says the following, and I quote, "Nabokov, for example, claimed (perhaps with tongue in cheek) that his family was descended from not less a personage than Genghiz Kahn himself, who 'is said to have fathered the Nabok, a petty Tatar prince in the twelfth century who married a Russian damsel in an era of intensely artistic Russian culture.'
Now through-out Figes's book he is generally respectful to Nabokov, as far as I can see, he nowhere indicates he was "a dick."
And you conveniently leave out that Figes recognized the tongue-in-cheek quality of Nabokov's claim. Nabokov was known for making fun of aristocrats and of interviewers and was known for making fun of himself at the same time. So here he is giving an interview to BBC-2, and the interviewer asks pretentious and portentous questions and Nabokov replies by making fun of himself and revealing all of his prejudices. In his answers, if you had actually read or heard the BBC interview, Nabokov, was as much making fun of his own pretentious assumptions and the pretentious assumptions of all people who think of themselves as "aristocrats" (as he certainly thought of himself) as making a claim that he thought people should take at face value. The sentence that Figes quotes (a portion of) begins by proclaiming that he (Nabokov) is certainly happier and healthier than the cruel Ghenghis Kahn. The paragraph in which this sentence occurs is a response to a question of whether he thinks life is a "very funny cruel joke." He begins by proclaiming that their is no such thing as "life" in general except as a "manifold shimmer" and as a "possessive epithet", he displays his usual bigotry by referring to the "flamboyant perversion" of Oscar Wilde, at the same time implying that he shouldn't have been punished, and then launches into a mish-mash about Ghengis Kahn and his (Nabokov's) literary characters.
Now as far as his "Alice in wonderland" translation is concerned I still don't get your point. Are you claiming that because this is what he is known for in Russia, then that is how we should judge him?
Nabokov was 22 years old when he translated "Alice In Wonderland", which I thought was called "Anya v strane chudes" in his original translation. I don't know Russian so what you say about "Anya v strane chudes" may be correct. But Karlinsky said that Nabokov's translation of Alice "with very few changes" could have become one of the best translations of "Alice in Wonderland" in any language. Also, in "Nabokov at Cornell", Gavriel Shapiro has a very good criticism of the critical reception of Nabokov's translations, and lists both the strengths and the faults of Nabokov's "Anya v strane chudes". He in no way indicates that it "sucks", but rather that it was by far a very good effort, performed under extreme time-pressure imposed by the publisher.
Finally, in _Alice in Many Tongues: The Translations of Alice in Wonderland_ by Warren Weaver, which I finally found on the top of one of my shelves way in the back, Weaver claims that many readers at the time praised Nabokov's translations of "Alice". Weaver reviews the reception of "Alice in Wonderland" translations through-out the world and tries to point out the good and the bad ones, the ones that took too much license and the ones that stuck too closely to aspects of the text that were too "British." He at least claims that Nabokov tried to maintain a balance and that it was a worthy translation. Now all of these people may be wrong, but given that most of us don't read Russian I am not sure that the list should accept your authority over the other Russian speakers who claim differently.
Jerry