"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music"

Vladimir Nabokov’s declaration of his loathings comprises a peculiar but revealing list: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, and soft music. At first glance, most items in his catalog share obvious weight and gravity, stupidity as willful ignorance, oppression as the exercise of unjust authority, crime as the violation of social order, and cruelty as deliberate harm toward others. These are consistently at the root of much of humanity’s suffering and are conventional targets of moral distaste; they signal a principled refusal to abide by forces and behaviors that degrade individual or social well-being.

What disrupts the list’s expectation is its closing element: soft music. Amid heinous qualities that commonly provoke strong ethical condemnation, soft music feels anomalous, even trivial. Its inclusion reveals Nabokov’s wit, a skewering of conventions, and an undercurrent of aesthetic intolerance. Where the preceding loathings are largely moral, the final one is idiosyncratic, shading his personal sensibilities. For Nabokov, “soft music” may symbolize mediocrity, tepid sentiment, or the faintly saccharine forms of art he finds banal and insipid. He wields the phrase to parody polite society’s taste, suggesting a loathing not merely for what is morally reprehensible, but also for what is artistically unchallenging.

The juxtaposition of ethical and aesthetic aversions dramatizes how Nabokov’s literary worldview combines passion for intellectual clarity, justice, and originality. The presence of “soft music” at the end of the sequence undercuts the seriousness of the preceding terms and reflects a disdain for anything that dulls the senses or intellect, whether it be violence or the gentle lulling of mediocrity. Nabokov’s list, both sincere and playful, thus serves as both a moral statement and a kind of self-portrait, revealing his acute tastes and his commitment to sharpness, vitality, and the rejection of the insipid in all forms of human experience.