Following Nabokov’s recommendations I had this generated by Gemini 2.5 preview:

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Based on a thorough review of the provided book, “Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor,” here is an exhaustive list of Vladimir Nabokov’s opinions on other writers as found within its pages.

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Abbé Prévost

• He likes his work, stating: “Manon Lescaut is very fine. You were speaking of love stories: Manon Lescaut is one of those books which give you a shiver, you know? That shiver… A little violin note, long sobs.”

Alain Robbe-Grillet

• He holds him in very high regard. He mentions that he appreciates Robbe-Grillet’s “way of looking” and that there are “no formulas, no general ideas, no bridges between the sentences” in his work.
• He considers Robbe-Grillet’s novel Jealousy to be “the finest love novel since Proust.” He also finds his novel The Voyeur to be among the finest French novels in thirty years.
• He notes, however, that the “theories advanced by my friend Robbe-Grillet leave me completely indifferent.”

Aleksey Remizov

• Nabokov’s opinion is entirely negative. In a review of The Star Above Stars, he finds the sagas “hopelessly flavorless,” lacking imagination and mastery. He criticizes the style as careless, awkward, and an “accidental combination of words,” calling it a “very boring game.”

Alexander Kuprin

• He expresses great admiration for Kuprin’s talent, particularly his ability to write about horses. He notes that when Kuprin writes about his passions, there is a remarkable “precision and purity of his expression.” He considers some of his writing to be “very good, very good,” even if some pages seem like quick jottings rather than finished works.

Alexander Pushkin

• Pushkin is the writer Nabokov reveres above all others.
• He states that to read and reread Pushkin’s works “is one of the glories of earthly life.”
• He describes him as a “colossus who bears on his shoulders our country’s entire poetry.”
• He worked for many years on a multi-volume translation and commentary of Eugene Onegin, which he calls the “great work of my life.” He consistently criticizes other translations as inadequate.
• He notes that his own life and work have a profound connection to Pushkin, from Pushkin’s influence on his own adolescent poetry to using a line from Pushkin as the Russian title for his autobiography.
• He notes that Pushkin “was fed by your eighteenth-century authors (to the point of plagiarism, conscious or not).”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

• Nabokov avoids direct literary criticism. When asked for his opinion, he changes the subject, saying he had a recent exchange of letters where he “praised the freedom and happiness of the West; he deplored the fact of his children not being able to get a Russian education abroad.”
• He classifies The Gulag Archipelago as “an important historical work, not fiction,” distinguishing it from the “fiction-coated tracts” he dislikes.

Alwin Thaler

• In a review of Thaler’s Shakespeare and Democracy, Nabokov criticizes the titular essay as “flimsy” and the premise of linking Shakespeare to democracy as futile. However, he praises other essays in the book, stating Thaler “brilliantly refutes” the view that Shakespeare lacked conscious art.

André-Marie Chénier

• He expresses his love for him, noting: “I love André Chenier, whom Pushkin knew by heart.”

André Malraux

• He dismisses him as “execrable.”

André Thérive

• He is mentioned as a co-author of the populist manifesto, but no opinion is given on his work.

Antonin Ladinsky

• He considers him a skilled poet, an “exception” among a new wave of writers who overuse the image of the rose.

Anton Chekhov

• He holds Chekhov in high esteem. He felt a “closeness” to him and taught his plays and stories at Cornell.
• He lists “The Lady with the Little Dog” (“Dama s sobachkoy”) as an “exemplary” short story.
• He quotes Chekhov’s opinion of Gorky approvingly: “The sea is laughing.’ But, then, Gorki was a bad writer. As Chekhov commented, the only thing you can say about the sea is: ‘The sea is big.’”

Arthur Bryant

• In a review of Pageant of England, Nabokov finds the book “brilliantly documented” and a “very satisfying picture,” though he criticizes the literary style for lapsing into clichés like “iron horse.”

Arthur Conan Doyle

• He mentions his stories on boxing. He later criticizes Doyle for preferring his historical works to Sherlock Holmes, which Nabokov attributes to “snobbery or simple stupidity.”

Balzac, Honoré de

• He considers him a “journalist,” not an artist.
• He dismisses one of his works (misremembering the title as The Woman and the Panther instead of A Passion in the Desert) as a “pile of rubbish.”

Boris Pasternak

• Nabokov’s opinion of his prose is uniformly scathing, while his view of his poetry is more mixed.
• He is used as an example of a bad poet in the review of Poplavsky’s work: “…an unbearable blend of Severyanin, Vertinsky, and Pasternak (the latter at his worst)”.
• He later calls him a “good poet. Not as great, of course, as Blok, but good.” He also says “Pasternak is not a bad poet. But in Zhivago he is vulgar.”
• He repeatedly attacks Doctor Zhivago, calling it a “sorry thing, full of clichés, clumsy, trivial and melodramatic,” a “mediocre melodrama with Trotskyist tendencies,” and “false to history and false to art.” He finds the metaphors “unattached” and the pseudo-religious strain shocking.
• He also deems Pasternak a “very poor” translator of Shakespeare.

Boris Pilnyak

• He judges his story “Mother Earth” as “clumsy, unnecessary, and false.” He also criticizes his “naïvest provincialism” in his stories about England and finds the psychology in “Beyond the Portage” weak.

Boris Poplavsky

• The book contains a famously harsh review of his first collection, Flags, calling him a “bad poet” whose work is an “unbearable blend” of other writers and whose knowledge of Russian is poor.
• However, even in this negative review, Nabokov singles out specific lines as “splendid” and “beautiful.”
• Crucially, the introduction to Think, Write, Speak quotes Nabokov’s later autobiographical note where he says he would “never forgive myself for the ill-tempered review in which I attacked him for trivial faults in his unfledged verse.”

Byron, George Gordon, Lord

• Mentions him as a student of a hundred years ago, alongside his “tamed bear.”
• He notes that Byron “eagerly befriended boxers and loved to watch their fights.”
• He states that what he read of English literature as a boy included “all of Byron.”

Camus, Albert

• His opinion is entirely negative. He calls him a “third-rate novelist,” finds his novel The Stranger “insipid,” and remarks that his “worst students” preferred “second-rate fellows as Faulkner and Camus to any real artist.” He also says of Franz Hellens, “It is a shame that he is read less than that awful Monsieur Camus and even more awful Monsieur Sartre.”

Cervantes, Miguel de

• He lists him among writers who are “dim-sighted or blind.”

Chateaubriand, François-René de

• The book reveals a significant evolution in Nabokov’s opinion. The introduction notes an early essay where Nabokov unexpectedly demotes him. However, a 1969 interview has Nabokov ranking him “among the greatest authors of all time.” He also frequently alludes to a nostalgic poem by Chateaubriand in relation to his own past.

Christiane Rochefort

• He read her novel Warrior’s Rest (Le Repos du guerrier) with “sheer pleasure.”

Claude Anet

• He mocks his “naïvely vulgar depictions of the ‘Russian soul’” and is suspicious of his supposed translation of Omar Khayyám.

Conrad, Joseph

• The introduction notes that Nabokov’s opinion evolved from an “unexpected promotion” in an early essay to later dismissal.
• The later negative views are present in the interviews. He rejects comparisons to Conrad, stating Conrad was never a Polish writer. He calls his books “books for children, they swarm with clichés, it’s unendingly romantic,” and compares his style unfavorably to “Pierre Loti.” He also dismisses him for dealing in “conceptual platitudes with a stale style.”

Dante Alighieri

• He lists Dante’s work (specifically the New Testament portion of the Divine Comedy) among the “best and most successful works in literature.” He praises Charles Singleton’s “splendid” translation of the Inferno.

Denis Diderot

• He states Diderot “dazzles me.”

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade

• He is “bored” by him and “hates” him. He defines his work as pornography: “quantity without quality. It’s banal, it’s not literature.”

Edgar Allan Poe

• When asked to name favorite stories, he lists Poe with the comment “A pleasant blur,” suggesting a fond but indistinct memory.

Edmund Wilson

• He is mentioned in relation to Doctor Zhivago: “people like Edmund Wilson and Isaiah Berlin, they have to love Zhivago to prove that good writing can come out of Soviet Russia. They ignore that it is really a bad book.”

Edward FitzGerald

• He praises him as a “brilliant English poet” whose version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is a work of art in its own right, not a mere translation.

Émile Zola

• He finds his political and sociological novels “unreadable.” He specifically calls The Earth a “pile of rubbish.”

Ernest Hemingway

• His opinion is mixed but leans negative. He dismisses him as “a writer for boys.”
• He elaborates: “Hemingway did some wonderful things. But those long novels—For Whom the Bell Tolls and the rest—I think they are abominable. He was, after all, a short-story writer.”
• He lists “The Killers” as a story he admires.

Evgeny Zamiatin

• He praises his story “The Cave” (“Peshchera”) as an “exemplary” short story.

Evgeny Yevtushenko

• He dismisses him as “Quite second-rate. He’s a good communist,” and also calls him a “little Aragon.”

Flaubert, Gustave

• Along with Pushkin, Flaubert is the writer Nabokov most consistently and ardently admires.
• “I love Flaubert and Proust.”
• “My best friend is Gustave Flaubert.”
• He cites Flaubert’s dedication to art as a model. He mentions that he cried when writing about Lolita’s meeting with Humbert “like Flaubert at the death of Madame Bovary.”
• He lists Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education as great works.

Franz Hellens

• He expresses great admiration, calling him a “great writer.” He particularly loves the novels Oeil-de-Dieu and La Femme partagée. He rates him infinitely superior to Camus and Sartre.

Franz Kafka

• He holds him in high esteem. He calls him an “artist of genius” and contrasts his “inwardly authentic world” favorably with Thomas Mann’s work.
• He says, “I feel much closer to Kafka, for example.”
• He lists “The Metamorphosis” as an “exemplary” short story.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

• His dislike for Dostoevsky is a strong and recurring theme.
• “I don’t like [him]. He’s a journalist: he doesn’t create, he hasn’t the time.”
• He finds his tragedy to be journalism, but his “slapstick is wonderful.”
• He groups him with Cervantes and Stendhal as “dim-sighted or blind” writers.
• He finds his moralism repulsive: “the moralism of Dostoevsky are regions of thought where I avoid setting foot.” He finds the explanation for Raskolnikov’s crime “sickening.”
• He states that “young simpletons all over the world love Dostoevsky—because it is so easy and fascinating to discuss mysticism and sin without reading him closely.”

Fyodor Gladkov

• The subject of a long and scathing analysis in an early essay. Nabokov finds his novel Cement full of “unbearable, self-satisfied talentlessness,” “extraordinary feats with his body parts,” and “bombastic verbiage.” He sees his work as a prime example of the “village dreadful.”

Fyodor Tyutchev

• He holds his poetry in the highest regard, comparing Ivan Bunin’s greatness to his: “a poet whose equal we have not had since Tyutchev’s time.” He also detects an influence of Tyutchev in the poetry of Khodasevich.

George Bernard Shaw

• He is mentioned for his novel about a boxer (Cashel Byron’s Profession). Later, Nabokov offers faint praise: “Even Shaw can… stir my artistic appetite,” in a way that avant-garde French novels do not.

Georges Bataille

• When asked about him as a theoretician of eroticism, Nabokov responds: “I know nothing about those theories.”

Gustave Flaubert

• See Flaubert, Gustave

H. G. Wells

• Nabokov expresses high praise for him, calling him a “great writer.”
• He singles out The Passionate Friends as his “most prized example of the unjustly ignored masterpiece,” containing a “touch of high art refused to Conrad or Lawrence.”
• He also mentions reading him voraciously as a boy.

Hilaire Belloc

• In his review, Nabokov finds Belloc’s essays have a “pleasing impression of your mild scholar’s candor” and his style can be of “perfect proportion.” However, he also criticizes him for being “trivial and remote simultaneously” and for his “tame” humor and “ecclesiastical” jokes.

Homer

• He lists his work among the “best and most successful works in literature.”

Horace

• He lists his work among the “best and most successful works in literature” and mentions his principle of art for art’s sake.

Ilf and Petrov

• He lists them among his “favorite Soviet writers,” although when asked to name specific stories, he replies “No special favorites.”

Ivan Bunin

• He has a very high opinion of his poetry, but a less positive view of him as a person.
• “Bunin’s poems are the best the Russian muse has created for several decades… a poet whose equal we have not had since Tyutchev’s time.”
• He notes that he came to find Bunin “increasingly coarse and unkind” and that he was “not a close friend.”

James Joyce

• His opinion is complex and highly positive.
• He lists Joyce alongside Homer, Flaubert, etc., as a writer of the “best and most successful works.”
• He teaches Ulysses and praises its “novelty of his form.”
• However, he criticizes Joyce’s method for representing inner monologue in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a “stylized exaggeration,” arguing that “people don’t think like that.”

J. D. Salinger

• He praises him very highly: “A great, wonderful writer—the best American novelist.” And “Beautiful stuff! He’s a real writer.”

Jean Genet

• He describes his work as “An interesting fairyland with good measurements.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

• He dismisses him as “not an artist.”
• “I’m bored by the word itself [existentialism]! I read something Sartre wrote. I didn’t know what he was talking about.” He criticizes Sartre’s interpretation of his novel Despair. He also says of Franz Hellens, “It is a shame that he is read less than that awful Monsieur Camus and even more awful Monsieur Sartre.”

John Galsworthy

• He dismisses his literary merit but makes a distinction about his character: “Galsworthy was a good man, I believe.” He also compares Pasternak’s handling of a character to Galsworthy’s clumsiness.

John Keats

• He expresses his admiration: “I enormously admire Shakespeare, Keats.” He also mentions reading him as a boy.

John Masefield

• His review of Masefield’s historical novel Basilissa is entirely negative, calling it a “splendid example of false romance and false history.”

John Updike

• He expresses admiration: “I’m also a great admirer of John Updike—the up, up, up Updike.”

Jules Supervielle

• He mentions having “very pleasant relations” with him in Paris in the 1930s.

Konstantin Fedin

• He considers him one of the few readable Soviet writers of his time, but still finds his novel Cities and Years flawed by its “ridiculous coincidences,” “vagueness of the hero,” and “melodramatic end.”

La Fontaine, Jean de

• Lists him among his favorite French authors.

Laurence Sterne

• He praises him as a “first-rate writer” in contrast to Samuel Richardson.

Leonid Andreev

• His opinion is mixed. He uses him as a negative comparison for a story by Pilnyak, implying a style of piled-on horrors. However, he also says he admires one of Andreev’s stories, “The one about the happy jailbird” (The Seven Who Were Hanged).

Léon Lemonnier

• Mentioned as the author of the Manifeste du roman populiste, but no opinion is given on his work.

Lewis Carroll

• He mentions having translated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into Russian.
• He jokingly calls him “the first Humbert Humbert,” alluding to his photographs of little girls.

Lydia Seifullina

• His opinion is scathingly negative. He places her “below the level of… Nagrodskaya or Charskaya,” calls her work “philistine women’s fiction,” “illiterate, pompous vulgarity,” and a type of “village dreadful.”

Marcel Proust

• He is one of Nabokov’s most admired writers.
• “I love Flaubert and Proust.”
• He praises In Search of Lost Time as one of the great works he teaches.
• “Proust’s characters have lived everywhere and always.”
• He sees a precedent for his own memoir in Proust’s novel.
• He considers Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy to be “the finest love novel since Proust.”
• He does, however, distinguish his own use of memory from Proust’s, stating his own memories are “direct rays deliberately trained, not sparks and spangles” resurrected by sensual juxtaposition.

Marivaux, Pierre de

• He dismisses him as a “journalist.”

Mark Aldanov

• He calls him his “dear friend” and praises him for not copying his characters from real people. He recalls with fondness reading Aldanov’s novel St. Helena: Little Island.

Maxim Gorky

• He has a negative opinion of his writing but a positive one of his character. “Gorki was a great character.” “Gorki was a bad writer.”

Mikhail Zoshchenko

• His opinion is contradictory within the book. In an early essay, he is very critical, calling his work “harmless, grayish, mawkish,” “stupidly false,” and full of “vulgarized Dostoevsky.”
• However, in a later interview, he lists Zoshchenko among his “favorite Soviet writers.”

Nina Berberova

• His review of her novel The Last and the First is very positive. He calls the book “beautifully wrought,” “unique, well-formed, and brilliant,” and describes her work as “literature of the highest quality, the creation of a true writer.”

Nikolai Gogol

• Nabokov feels a “closeness” to him and wrote a book about him.
• He lists Dead Souls and “The Overcoat” (“Shinel’”) as masterpieces. He offers his own translation of the title “Shinel’” as “The Carrick.”
• He praises his “unique and harmonious world” and his use of “word-connection.”
• However, he also mentions “the didacticism of Gogol” as a “region of thought where I avoid setting foot.”

Osip Mandelshtam

• His opinion is nuanced. He calls him a “splendid poet” but also a “charming dead end” whose imitable style is not a path forward for poetry. His poetry is “almost glassy,” with a “sense of weight and weightiness.”
• In a later interview, he lists Mandelshtam among his “favorite Soviet writers” and notes he died in a concentration camp.

Panteleimon Romanov

• He finds him “immensely boring to read” and a “small-scale writer.”

Paul Valéry

• He is not mentioned in the text.

Paul Verlaine

• He mentions reading his poetry as a boy. He also criticizes a rhyme in his poem “Nevermore” as “incestuous.” He dismisses Samuel Beckett’s French poems as “bad Verlaine.”

Pierre Loti

• He dismisses his travel writing as ruined by the “Parisian boulevards” and compares Conrad’s style unfavorably to his.

Plato

• “I don’t wish to get mixed up with Plato, whom I do not care for.”

Rabelais, François

• He alludes to Rabelais’s term for the afterlife, “le grand peut-être” (“the great Maybe”).

Richardson, Samuel

• He dismisses him as a “third-rate writer. Such frigidity…” and notes that he read him in French paraphrases as a boy.

Rimbaud, Arthur

• He states he had read his poetry at twelve. He finds Rimbaud’s famous sonnet “Voyelles” (“Vowels”) to be “suspiciously lyrical, with too many metaphors and not enough precise details.” In 1977, he is rereading his “marvelous verse.”

Robert Frost

• His opinion is mixed. “Not everything he wrote was good. There is lots of trash. But I believe that rather obvious little poem on the woods [‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’] is one of the greatest ever written.” He also describes the poet in his novel Pale Fire as “a follower of Robert Frost.”

Romain Rolland

• He mentions having translated his novel Colas Breugnon in his youth.

Ronsard, Pierre de

• Lists him among his favorite French authors.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

• His opinion is mostly negative. He calls him a “mediocre” novelist. While there are “great passages in his Confessions,” his La Nouvelle Héloïse “almost killed me, but I read it.” He also mentions Rousseau’s bashfulness with a Venetian woman.

Rupert Brooke

• He is the subject of a long, admiring essay from Nabokov’s youth. Nabokov praises his “radiant liquidity,” his love for the earth, and his constant meditation on the afterlife. He sees Brooke’s primary artistic quality as his “passionate service to pure beauty.”

Sasha Chorny (Alexander Glikberg)

• He writes a warm tribute to him as a “dear man and a good poet” with “excellent taste,” who was exceptionally kind and helpful to the young Nabokov with his early poems.

Shakespeare, William

• Nabokov’s admiration for Shakespeare is boundless and frequently stated.
• He lists Hamlet among his favorite books and among the “best and most successful works of literature.”
• He states, “English poetry is supreme,” starting with Shakespeare.
• The book contains three reviews of works about Shakespeare, where Nabokov shows his deep engagement with Shakespearean scholarship, siding with critics like W. W. Greg and John Dover Wilson against more populist interpretations.
• He states that he read Shakespeare’s tragedies in the original at age twelve.

Shot’ha Rust’hveli

• He praises his poem The Knight in the Tiger’s Skin for its author’s “genius and leisure,” its “dazzling metaphors,” and its charm.

Sigmund Freud

• Nabokov’s contempt for Freud is a constant and virulent theme.
• He dismisses him as a “charlatan,” a “Viennese quack,” and an “old umbrella-seller.”
• He finds his theories a “disgusting racket” and “Bolshevik”-like “internal police.”
• He says he appreciates Freud only “as a comic author. The explanations he offers of the emotions and the dreams of his patients are incredible burlesque.”

Stendhal

• He dismisses him as a “journalist” and lists him among writers who are “dim-sighted or blind.” He finds his novel The Charterhouse of Parma “inept.”

Sterne, Laurence

• He praises him as a “first-rate writer,” contrasting him favorably with Samuel Richardson.

Thomas Mann

• His opinion is entirely negative. He calls him a “small writer who did big stories badly.”
• His lecture on Mann’s story “The Railway Accident” is a detailed demolition, finding it “completely inartistic,” built on the “bog of platitudes, of average and therefore false and dead ideas.”

Thomas Wolfe

• He dismisses him with a single word: “Mediocrity!”

Tolstoy, Leo

• He holds Tolstoy in the highest esteem, especially as a prose writer.
• “I don’t think he has any peer in any other country. I think he’s much greater than Proust or James Joyce, to take two other greats.”
• He lists Anna Karenin as a great work and one he taught. He also praises The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
• He notes that he read Tolstoy when he was “very small.”

Truman Capote

• His opinion is mixed. “I like some of Truman Capote’s stuff, particularly In Cold Blood. Except for that impossible end, so sentimental, so false. But there are scenes in which he writes with true appetite, and he presents them very well.”

Valéry, Paul

• He mentions having “very pleasant relations” with him through Jean Paulhan in the 1930s.

Valery Bryusov

• He describes his poetry as “dead slabs” and unfavorably compares him to Ivan Bunin.

Vladislav Khodasevich

• He calls him a “great poet.” His review of Khodasevich’s Collected Poems calls it a “ravishing work of art” with “astonishing rhythms” and “acute unexpectedness of the imagery.”
• He considers him, alongside Pasternak, one of “the two greatest Russian poets of recent years.”

Voltaire

• He is mentioned for his translation of Hamlet in one of the reviews of books on Shakespeare.

Walt Whitman

• He is mentioned in a review of a book on Shakespeare, where Nabokov dismisses what Whitman thought of Shakespeare (“if that can be called thinking”).

Willa Cather

• When asked for an opinion, he responds: “You must have invented Willa Cather.”

William Faulkner

• His opinion is consistently and strongly negative.
• He dismisses him as “not an artist.”
• “I am completely deaf to Faulkner. I do not understand what people see in him. He has been invented. Surely, he was not a real person.”
• He calls him a “second-rate fellow” preferred by his “worst students.” He also rejects “regional literature, artificial folklore.”

Yuri Olesha

• He lists him among his “favorite Soviet writers.” He also praises his story “The Cherry Pit” (“Vishnevaia kostochka”) as “exemplary.”