ABSTRACT
For the New York Intellectuals, the journey to an anti-Stalinism which, for all practical purposes, denied and erased their earlier anti-capitalism, was accompanied by an increasing preoccupation with the cultural life of their own country. This group became powerful advocates of mass culture theory; in turn, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) served as a vehicle for the transmission of a body of ideas which held considerable appeal for mid-twentieth-century intellectuals. Nabokov's focus was very much on the deformed high culture of the USSR, with little surface interest in the culture mills grinding away on Madison Avenue and Broadway. Yet it remains true that, in his position as the Congress's secretary-general, he moved in circles much taken up with fears of the new mass culture. Well-exposed to the ideas of the mass culture theorists, Nabokov attacked Soviet culture as the triumph of the middlebrow, drawing on the key issues in the critique of middlebrow culture.
