SOURCE: “Nabokov's (Re)visions of Dostoevsky,” in Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives, edited by Julian W. Connolly, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 141-57.

[In the following essay, Connolly examines Nabokov's variations of Dostoevskian themes in his fiction.]

A writer's relationship to the literary legacy of the past finds expression in a multitude of forms. Theoretical works by Yury Tynianov, Harold Bloom, and Gérard Genette, among others, have outlined some of the ways in which writers may articulate their attitudes toward the work of their predecessors. Vladimir Nabokov's attitude toward writers of the past was itself multi-faceted. When examining his approach toward the legacy of the past, readers need to distinguish between the declarations he made in interviews and lectures, and the more subtle reminiscences or allusions he incorporated into his literary texts. This is especially true in the case of Nabokov's treatment of Fedor Dostoevsky. While there were enormous differences in artistic temperament, stylistic technique, and philosophical world view, and Nabokov's professed antipathy for Dostoevsky's excesses was both highly critical and highly public, the evidence of his prose fiction reveals a more complex relationship. When one looks at the entire body of Nabokov's fiction, one must conclude that Dostoevsky was not just a “figure of fun” to Nabokov the writer. On the contrary, it is apparent that Nabokov's views on Dostoevsky underwent a complex evolution.¹ Most important to Nabokov, perhaps, were Dostoevsky's remarkable explorations of human consciousness. As we shall see, the young Nabokov found in Dostoevsky's work a stimulating set of ideas and techniques that helped shape his own unique portraits of human imagination and obsession. Dostoevsky's fiction provided Nabokov with provocative models of human imagination, both in terms of the kinds of visions attributed to his fictional characters and in terms of the way these visions are conveyed to the reader (that is, through particular kinds of first-person, confessional narratives). This article attempts to chart the dimensions of Nabokov's evolving relationship to the work of Fedor Dostoevsky.²

We may perhaps discern echoes of Dostoevsky in Nabokov's first novel Mary (Mashen'ka, 1926). Lev Ganin, Nabokov's protagonist, may be a distant relative of a figure represented in Dostoevsky's early writings, the character known as the “dreamer.” Dostoevsky wrote about the dreamer both in a feuilleton, “The Petersburg Chronicle” (“Peterburgskaia letopis',” published on June 15, 1847), and in his short story “White Nights”(“Belye nochi,” 1848). According to Dostoevsky, the dreamer is one who loses touch with the everyday environment because of his intoxication with the alluring visions created in his imagination. For such a person, the world apprehended in one's dreams has more substance and appeal than the world in which one eats, sleeps, and moves. The young narrator of “White Nights” confesses to being such a dreamer, and he describes one radiant dream involving a romance between two young lovers in a gloomy, deserted garden, “with its paths overgrown with weeds, dark and secluded, where they used to hope, grieve, love, love each other so tenderly and so well.”³ The story of the romance continues with complications involving the young woman's old husband, the separation of the lovers, and their ultimate reunion “far from his native shores” in an “alien land” (WN, 168). Immersed in such dreams, the dreamer acknowledges how startling it is to be interrupted by “a dear old lady” who stops him in the middle of the street and “politely asks him the way” (WN, 165).

Ganin too becomes caught up in a series of reveries about a romance that unfolded in the dark paths of an old estate in Russia and culminated in the separation of the lovers. The woman he loved is now married to an older man, and Ganin too imagines a reunion with his beloved in an alien land, Germany. Like the dreamer, he is immersed in his reveries as he roams the city streets until he is “politely stopped by a foot passenger” who asks him “how to get to such and such a street.”⁴ Also like the dreamer, Ganin feels that the scenes created in his mental reverie have more substance than the world in which his body moves (see, e.g., Mary, 55 [ch. 8]). Is it coincidence that Ganin's immersion in his recollection of romance lasts four days and comes to an end on the morning of the fifth day, and this happens to be almost the precise amount of time covered by the dreamer's infatuation with a woman he meets in “White Nights”?⁵

Of course, one could point out that Ganin's reverie is the recollection and recreation of an actual romance that took place over a much longer period of time than the romance which forms the main plot of “White Nights.” Yet it is also worth noting that the dreamer's experience of infatuation and loss is recounted from memory as well. What is more, Dostoevsky's dreamer characterizes himself as a poet, and it is possible that his account may have been subject to a process of artistic rearrangement and revision. Indeed, at one point, the woman he is talking with reproaches him for his style of narration: “You see, you talk as if you were reading from a book” (WN, 163).⁶

A more important difference, however, between Dostoevsky's and Nabokov's portraits of the dreamer lies in the way the two writers conclude their works. Both texts end with a scene of “awakening,” and these scenes have some striking elements in common. Not only are both scenes set in the morning, they both contain an experience of seeing the world with a fresh vision, as we shall see below. Yet here is where the two authors' visions diverge. Crushed by the collapse of his romantic hopes, Dostoevsky's dreamer awakens to see the world grown older and darker (“The walls and the floors looked discoloured, everything was dark and grimy”; WN, 200). Ganin, in contrast, awakens to see a world flooded with bright light and new hopes. As if to underscore the disparity between his character's new state of mind and that of Dostoevsky's dreamer, Nabokov follows Dostoevsky in including a passage in which his hero looks at a nearby building. The difference in what the two men see is telling. First, the dreamer's observation: “I don't know why, but when I looked out of the window the house opposite, too, looked dilapidated and dingy, the plaster on its columns peeling and crumbling, its cornices blackened and full of cracks, and its bright brown walls disfigured by large white and yellow patches” (WN, 200). Ganin, however, looks at a new house that is still under construction. The description reads, in part: “The wooden frame shone like gold in the sun … the yellow sheen of fresh timber was more alive than the most lifelike dream of the past” (Mary, 114 [ch. 16]). While Dostoevsky leaves his dreamer motionless in his room, passively contemplating the crumbling remnants of his unfulfilled dreams, Nabokov has Ganin abandon his room, and confidently stride off to undertake new experiences and new adventures. In ending this novel as he does, Nabokov suggests that Ganin has achieved a kind of balanced view of dreams and reality. While appreciating the richness of mental reverie, Ganin also discovers a new alertness to the potential richness of “real” life. Dostoevsky's dreamer, on the other hand, has become so dependent on his insular dreams that he is shattered by his contact with “real” life. In this, perhaps, he anticipates the anxiety experienced by the narrator of Nabokov's novel, The Eye (Sogliadatai, 1930). While both “White Nights” and Mary hint at the potential dangers of intoxication with dreams, only Mary illuminates a path out of that entrancing yet enervating realm.⁷

Whatever impact the image of Dostoevsky's dreamer may have had on Nabokov, there can be no doubt that Dostoevsky's early novel The Double (Dvoinik, 1846) represents a crucial text for Nabokov in his investigation of certain dimensions of human consciousness. Much of the fiction that Nabokov created during the years in which he became a writer of the first rank (the late 1920s and early 1930s) revolves around themes presented in that novel. Nabokov scholars have commented on numerous motifs that connect The Double and works such as The Eye and Despair (Otchaianie, 1934).⁸ It is my intention to delineate a few fundamental thematic patterns that will underpin Nabokov's major fiction from this point on in his career.

In The Double Dostoevsky focuses on a man who is desperately insecure about his place in the world. Alternating between postures of self-affirmation and self-effacement, Yakov Goliadkin feels such stress at his vulnerability before others that he undergoes a strange bifurcation of identity: he sees in his world an identical double, and he alternately tries to make friends with this double and to expose him as a fraud. Ultimately, though, Goliadkin becomes overwhelmed with fear that his double will squeeze him out of his position in the world and take his place altogether. Nabokov found this tale to be a fertile source of personal inspiration. In an uncharacteristically warm assessment of Dostoevsky's writing, he told his Cornell students that the story is “a perfect work of art.”⁹ Yet in the same series of lectures on Dostoevsky, while commenting on books that one might dislike, he noted that one “may still derive artistic delight from imagining other and better ways of looking at things, or what is the same, expressing things, than the author you hate does” (Lectures on Russian Literature [LRL,] 105). When one studies Nabokov's fiction of the early 1930s, one senses that he examined Dostoevsky's achievements in The Double with great care, and then went on to imagine “other and better ways” of expressing these achievements in works such as The Eye and Despair.

One of the most distinctive features of The Double is a basic hesitation it creates in the reader's mind. When Goliadkin imagines that his identical double has occupied a desk directly opposite his own, or that the double steals a document from under his nose and takes it into the director's office, or that the double makes jokes about Goliadkin with the other clerks, the reader cannot be sure whether Goliadkin is imagining the entire episode, or whether there actually is another person in Goliadkin's office upon whom Goliadkin projects his sense of physical identity. One critic has even argued that almost all the incidents described in The Double are nothing but a hallucination, and that they take place entirely within Goliadkin's fevered consciousness.¹⁰

Imagining other and better ways of manipulating this situation, Nabokov created a series of fascinating variations on its basic themes. In The Eye, for example, the narrator's claim that he is observing an independent “other”—the character Smurov—turns out to be false. There is no “double”; there is only the narrator who has come up with the idea of viewing himself from the outside as a kind of defense against public opinion. While the initial creation of the other self in The Eye stems from conditions remarkably similar to those described in The Double (the insecure narrator's fragile ego receives a crushing blow when he is humiliated in front of others, and he begins to see his “other” after he undergoes a kind of psychic death),¹¹ Nabokov provides an entirely different resolution to the initial dilemma. Dostoevsky's Goliadkin is desperately afraid of losing his place in the world, and he has a terrifying nightmare in which he sees hordes of Goliadkins springing up behind him to fill the entire city of Petersburg. Nabokov's narrator, in contrast, claims to welcome the fact of his own “non-existence,” and he seemingly relishes the task of collecting the numerous images of Smurov circulating around him. This, then, is one of the major distinctions between Dostoevsky's narrative and Nabokov's text: where Dostoevsky's text is saturated with tones of anxiety, dread, and horror, the story narrated by Nabokov's protagonist is conveyed in a spirit of relentless bravado. Also important is the impact of the story on the reader. Whereas Dostoevsky weaves a tale that leaves the reader utterly confused over what is really going on in the work, Nabokov fashions a small puzzle that he invites his readers to solve as they savor the work. Indeed, Nabokov asserts in the preface to the English translation of the work that “only that reader who catches on at once will derive genuine satisfaction from The Eye.”¹² The lucidity of Nabokov's narrative contrasts vividly with the confusion generated by Dostoevsky's uneven narrative tone.

In The Eye, Nabokov fashioned one variant of the initial situation created in The Double. His hero claims to be observing an individual who serves as his rival in certain situations (such as wooing a woman named Vanya), but the claim turns out to be illusory: Smurov and the narrator are not separate individuals; they are one and the same. In Despair, Nabokov fashions a new variant of the situation found in The Double, this time reversing the resolution he offered in The Eye. Here, the narrator Hermann Karlovich claims to have found an identical double in the person of a tramp named Felix. Yet this time, the resolution of the initial situation is not that Hermann and Felix are one and the same. In fact, they are separate individuals. The trick here, however, is that Hermann and Felix do not look at all like each other.

Thus, Nabokov has appropriated the fundamental ambiguity created by Dostoevsky in The Double and resolved it in two different directions in two different works. Reading The Double, one does not know whether Goliadkin actually sees another person in his office who looks like him, or whether he is entirely imagining the existence of another person. In The Eye, Nabokov explores the second alternative, and in Despair, he explores a variant of the first. Moreover, in each novel Nabokov introduces a playful rebuttal to one of the central concerns haunting Dostoevsky's protagonist. The narrator of The Eye not only does not fear the existence of a multitude of mirror reflections, he welcomes them, for they open up the possibility for him to resist definition by others. The narrator of Despair [hereafter cited as Des] introduces an alternate response to the issue of multiplication of the basic self: he too welcomes it, but for a different reason. In his words, he looks forward to a time when “all men will resemble one another as Hermann and Felix did; a world of Helixes and Fermanns; a world where the worker fallen dead at the feet of his machine will be at once replaced by his perfect double smiling the serene smile of perfect socialism.”¹³ Here Nabokov revises Goliadkin's horror of multiple doubles to satirize the Soviet dream of a world of mass equality, a faith in “the impending sameness of us all” (Des, 20 [ch. 2]).¹⁴

When composing Despair, Nabokov also drew on distinctive elements found in other Dostoevsky works to add to the basic theme of bifurcation of identity raised in The Double. These include the morally repugnant notion of committing murder to fulfill an abstract, self-serving scheme (from Crime and Punishment), and the anxious, wheedling tone of a personal confession (derived from Notes from the Underground). In a very real sense Despair may be the single work by Nabokov that displays the most prominent array of Dostoevsky intertexts. What is one to make of this? Several critics have noted that Nabokov's novel parodies narrative and compositional features that are broadly recognized as Dostoevskian.¹⁵ Yet as Alexander Dolinin has shown, the target of Nabokov's parodic jabs in the original Russian version of Despair was not so much Dostoevsky himself as “a strong Dostoevskian strain in the contemporary Russian literature from Symbolists to the post-revolutionary modernists.”¹⁶ This is a distinction that Nabokov himself apparently made in a speech delivered in Berlin on March 20, 1931, and it is indicated in the title of the talk: “Dostoevsky without Dostoevskianism” (“Dostoevskii bez dostoevshchiny”). As we shall see, when Nabokov revisited the novel in preparing its translated version, he shifted the sights of his parody to target Dostoevsky himself more directly.

Nonetheless, the central theme found in The Double and developed by Nabokov in The Eye and Despair—the preoccupation of a character with an apparent alter ego and a concern over a possible mingling or exchange of identity—became an essential theme in Nabokov's work from this point onwards. Over the course of his career, he would produce several other dazzling variations on it. Thus, while traces of the theme can be found in such works as Invitation to a Beheading (Priglashenie na kazn', 1935-36) and The Gift (Dar, 1937-38),¹⁷ it emerges with full force as a core concern of his first English-language novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (written 1938-39, published 1941). The narrator of the novel, identified only by the initial V., claims to be working on a biography of his late half-brother, a writer named Sebastian Knight. What makes the novel particularly distinctive is the way Nabokov creates a curious blending of “reality” and “fiction” in V.'s quest. That is, V. encounters people who seem to have come to life from the pages of Sebastian Knight's fiction, and V. discovers that his own research draws him perilously near to the central emotional experiences of Sebastian's own life. By the end of his narrative, V. proclaims: “I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”¹⁸ Readers of the novel have vigorously debated the issue of whether V. and Sebastian were indeed separate, autonomous figures or whether one “created” the other.¹⁹ We must note, though, that the ambiguity raised by Nabokov in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is of an entirely different order than the atmosphere of mystery and confusion permeating The Double. The apparent overlapping of identity is not a source of terror for Nabokov's protagonist, nor does it produce a sense of bewilderment for Nabokov's reader. Again, as in The Eye, Nabokov has created an intricate pattern that challenges the reader to ponder the relationship between “reality” and fiction, and to realize that any narrative about a life inevitably tends to fictionalize that very life. What is more, Nabokov's novel suggests that the “real” life of any writer rests in the writer's fiction, not in a mechanical recitation of names, dates, and locations.

Nabokov would return to this theme again in Pale Fire, but once more he produces a new variation on the basic theme. In this novel, a college professor named Charles Kinbote claims that an autobiographical poem written by John Shade contains veiled allusions to Kinbote's former life as King Charles II of the land of Zembla. Even more than in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov constructs his novel in such a way that the reader discerns an intriguing pattern of interlacing themes, details, and concerns between the lives and works of John Shade and Charles Kinbote. Once again, readers and scholars have engaged in a vigorous debate about whether Shade and Kinbote are truly separate beings, or whether one is the creation of the other, or whether they are both the creation of a third figure in the novel, such as a professor named Botkin.²⁰ Yet Nabokov has not merely retraced his own steps here. As a commentator on the life of another, Charles Kinbote does not seek merely to “find and follow” the patterns of his subject's life, as did V. in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (see RLSK, 202 [ch. 20]). The worlds evoked both through Shade's poem and through Kinbote's commentary breathe with an energy and independent life of their own. Their relationship is less one of imitation or replication than of counterpoint and complement.

Once again, it is clear in this novel how far Nabokov had moved beyond the theme of multiplication of identity found in The Double. Although Charles Kinbote evinces a spirit of paranoia that may recall Goliadkin's anxieties in The Double, he tries to suppress his distress and instead reaches out to his audience, calling upon them to contemplate the mystery and beauty of patterns of recurrence in the world. What the reader finds both in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and in Pale Fire is an attitude that contrasts sharply with the pervasive tension informing The Double. Unlike Goliadkin, who is terrified at the thought that there exist in his environment other beings who may be so like him that they can even take up his place in the world, Nabokov's protagonists seem to welcome the idea that the cosmos contains other “beings akin to them” (to paraphrase the final phrase of Invitation to a Beheading). Where does this attitude come from?

In part, it reflects Nabokov's own predilection for imagining other identities. He once told an interviewer that people “tend to underestimate the power of my imagination and my capacity of evolving serial selves in my writings” (Strong Opinions [hereafter abbreviated as SO,] 24). He often created fictional alter egos who crop up in his work in various guises, sometimes bearing anagrammatic variations of his name. He even made a most unGoliadkin-like pronouncement when he responded to an interviewer's inquiry about his “social circle” in Montreux. After mentioning the ducks and grebes of Lake Geneva, his sister Elena, Van Veen (he was finishing Ada), he asks: “Who else? A Mr. Vivian Badlook” (SO, 110).²¹ Beyond the humor, however, one perhaps detects a deeper wish—the impulse to transcend the confines of the solipsistic prison of the self. In this regard, one thinks of Nabokov's analysis of the relationship of a writer and his audience: “I am all for the ivory tower, and for writing to please one reader alone—one's own self. But one also needs some reverberation, if not response, and a moderate multiplication of one's self through a country or countries; and if there be nothing but a void around one's desk, one would expect it to be at least a sonorous void, and not circumscribed by the walls of a padded cell” (SO, 37; emphasis added).

Yet beneath this desire for a “moderate multiplication of one's self” in the audience there perhaps lies an even more profound impulse. For this, we should consider Nabokov's description in Speak, Memory [hereafter abbreviated as SM] of the powerful effect that the feeling of love has on his sense of self: “Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love—from my heart, from the tender nucleus of personal matter—to monstrously remote points of the universe” (SM, 297 [ch. 15]). He continues: “I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence” (SM, 297 [ch. 15]). It is through intimate connections with other beings that one steps out of the “horror” of the solitary soul.

By the time he wrote Pale Fire, the complexity of Nabokov's fictions had developed far beyond the cunning variations on issues of identity and doubling found in The Eye and Despair. What is more, Nabokov's attitude toward Dostoevsky's legacy had undergone a considerable evolution as well. In the mid-1940s, as he began to teach works of Russian literature, first at Wellesley College, and later at Cornell, he re-examined many works by the major Russian authors. Now looking at these works with the probing eye of a teacher as well as a writer, he developed a more critical attitude toward Dostoevsky. In September 1946, Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson that he had been re-reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: “The latter is a third rate writer and his fame is incomprehensible.”²² He told his Wellesley students that we would give Dostoevsky the grade of C– as a writer (Tolstoy received A+).²³ The lecture notes preserved from his teaching at Cornell offer more detailed insight into the specific flaws Nabokov detected in Dostoevsky's writing (see LRL, 97-135). Perhaps most important was Nabokov's perception of Dostoevsky as a disturbing blend of journalist and prophet. In Dostoevsky's work, Nabokov perceived a deplorable tendency toward didacticism at the expense of art. In addition, Nabokov decried Dostoevsky's lack of attention to concrete detail, his weakness for sentimental clichés, and his reliance on melodramatic stage effects. A pithy remark he prepared for an interview in 1963 sums up his negative appraisal of Dostoevsky: “He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. … [H]is sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway” (SO, 42).

This last comment about “sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes” is, of course, a reference to Crime and Punishment, and it echoes a more discursive analysis in Nabokov's Cornell lectures of a sentence from Crime and Punishment that Nabokov characterizes as follows: “But then comes this singular sentence that for sheer stupidity has hardly the equal in world-famous literature” (LRL, 110). He then quotes the sentence—“The candle was flickering out, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had been reading together the eternal book”—and he subjects it to a scathing critique. What he finds most objectionable about the sentence is its linkage of a “filthy murderer” and an “unfortunate girl” (LRL, 110). He sees in this “a shoddy literary trick” and “a gust of false eloquence” (LRL, 110). Not only does he find it reprehensible that Dostoevsky would link the “inhuman and idiotic crime” of Raskolnikov with the “plight of a girl who impairs human dignity by selling her body” (LRL, 110), he accurately notes that while Dostoevsky describes in great detail Raskolnikov's crime, his muddled motives, etc., the novelist tells the reader almost nothing about Sonia's acts as a prostitute. He sums up this elision as “a glorified cliché”: “The harlot's sin is taken for granted. Now I submit that the true artist is the person who never takes anything for granted” (LRL, 113).

I would argue that Nabokov's indignation over Dostoevsky's handling of the Raskolnikov–Sonia relationship played a role in the design of his most famous novel Lolita, which was written during his years at Cornell. The novel contains several threads of an anti-Dostoevsky polemic, and these are primarily centered on the relationship between Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze, and on the way Humbert as narrator treats Dolly as the subject of his narration. Several critics have noted that the theme of sexual child abuse in Lolita [hereafter abbrviated as Lo]recalls a series of parallel situations depicted in Dostoevsky's work: Svidrigailov has a reputation for child abuse in Crime and Punishment, and Nikolay Stavrogin in The Devils writes a document implicating himself in the abuse of a child who, at twelve, was the same age as Dolly Haze when Humbert first saw her. Humbert himself writes that he felt a “Dostoevskian grin dawning” as he contemplated the fact that by marrying Dolly's mother he would be able to have ready access to the child (Lo, 70 [pt. 1, ch. 17]). Yet Nabokov's handling of this theme engages in a subtle, though forceful, polemic with Dostoevsky. Just as Nabokov noted with indignation the relative lack of authorial attention given to Sonia and her plight, so too Katherine O'Connor has pointed out that the little girl mentioned in Stavrogin's confession hardly exists “as a living personality”; she is, in fact, “virtually expendable as a truly individualized character.”²⁴ In Lolita, Nabokov set out to remedy this recurrent disregard for the living personality of the child, and he did so in a particularly subtle way. First, he created a narrator who initially seems to reproduce Dostoevsky's fundamental error: Humbert focuses almost exclusively on his suffering, his “crime,” and he allows the reader almost no direct access into his victim's inner world. Indeed, he confesses near the end of the novel that he “did not know a thing about [his] darling's mind, and that quite possibly … there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate …” (Lo, 284 [pt. 2, ch. 32]). Nevertheless, he provides enough glimpses of Dolly's personality for the reader to recognize that behind the image of “this Lolita, my Lolita” exists a valiant, spirited child who struggles to find her independence much like a distant hill Humbert observes “scrambling out—scarred but still untamed—from the wilderness of agriculture that was trying to swallow it” (Lo, 153 [pt. 2, ch. 1]).

In addition to the theme of child abuse, Nabokov parodies other elements from Dostoevsky's work. Thus, Humbert's confession, with its clear awareness of the reactions of its intended audience, resonates with the self-conscious confessions written by the narrator in Notes from the Underground and by Stavrogin in The Devils. In each case, the narrator-confessor is acutely aware of the potential response of his anonymous audience, and he seeks to manipulate that response. Yet while all three confessions are pre-eminently self-centered and self-serving, the two confessions in Dostoevsky's work never break out of that mode.²⁵ Humbert's confession, in contrast, ultimately does serve another purpose. Most readers find in the final stages of Humbert's narrative a broader desire not merely to explain his behavior, but to atone or compensate in some small way for the damage he has inflicted upon Dolly. Unlike the suffering of Sonia Marmeladov or the 12-year-old Matresha, Dolly's suffering transcends the clichés of sentimentalism, and it merits both a serious exposure and a belated expression of remorse.

While Nabokov's Lolita displays other traces of the writer's new polemic with Dostoevsky,²⁶ it was when he revised his translation of Despair for the 1966 edition that Nabokov took full advantage of the opportunity to castigate his famed predecessor for his handling of the “inhuman and idiotic crime” of Raskolnikov's murder. Insightful readings by Davydov (“The Shattered Mirror”), Dolinin (“Caning of Modernist Profaners”), and Foster (Nabokov's Art of Memory) have delineated many of the specific ways in which Nabokov's novel responds to and rejects essential elements of Dostoevsky's art, and it would be superfluous to retrace those readings here. We should note with Dolinin, though, the primary effect of Nabokov's revisions. After dissecting the flaws of Dostoevsky's work in his Cornell lectures, Nabokov retargeted the aim of his parody of dostoevshchina (“Dostoevsky stuff”) away from such epigones as Leonid Andreev and Il'ia Ehrenburg, and he directed his parody squarely at Dostoevsky himself.²⁷ Not only did he introduce new, derogatory references to Dostoevsky into his English translation (see, e.g., such phrases as “the Dusty-and-Dusky charm of hysterics” [Des, 188 [ch. 10]; emphasis added] and “Crime and Pun” [Des, 201 [ch. 11]]), but he also reshaped some earlier references to give them a more pointed edge. Thus, the original Russian phrase that read “in spite of a grotesque resemblance to Raskolnikov” becomes in English the more caustic “in spite of a grotesque resemblance to Rascalnikov” (Des, 189 [ch. 10]).

When we recall the specific criticisms leveled by Nabokov at Crime and Punishment in his Cornell lectures, we should take special note of the vehemence with which he disparaged Dostoevsky's treatment of Raskolnikov as a “sensitive” murderer. Not only did Nabokov find Dostoevsky's exposition of the reasons for Raskolnikov's crime “extremely muddled” (LRL, 113), but he also faulted Dostoevsky for failing to show any true development within the character. As he argues: “we see a man go from a premeditated murder to the promise of an achievement of some kind of harmony with the outer world, but all this happens from without” (LRL, 109). Having chided Dostoevsky for putting his characters in the position of “sinning their way to Jesus” (LRL, 104), Nabokov would have frowned upon Raskolnikov's sudden conversion at the end of the novel, when for some inexplicable reason the character suddenly experiences true love for Sonia and is ready to begin a new life of repentance and regeneration.

Indeed, in his foreword to the English version of Despair Nabokov refers to the issue of development and change within his own literary characters. Comparing Humbert Humbert with Hermann Karlovich, Nabokov suggests a significant difference between Humbert (whose sense of remorse we noted above) and Hermann, who steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the error of his ways: “Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann” (Des, xiii [“Foreword”]). Through these two characters, Nabokov offers two different responses to the kind of character created by Dostoevsky in Raskolnikov. Having castigated Dostoevsky for failing to show any development in Raskolnikov's personality, Nabokov offers Humbert as an example of a character who does undergo inner changes, with moving results. In the character of Hermann, on the other hand, he provides an alternative rebuttal to the Raskolnikov model: his murderer does not undergo any internal change, and never acknowledges his true culpability. At the same time, he is not offered any sudden transformation or redemption at the end of the novel. In this way, perhaps, Hermann's assertion that the “grotesque resemblance to Rascalnikov” is “canceled” (Des, 189 [ch. 10]) carries some validity. While he in many respects is a sterile follower of Raskolnikov, he does not succumb to any miraculous religious conversion. He remains a “filthy murderer” to the very end.

Nabokov would continue his efforts to debunk the mystique of Dostoevsky at various points in his career after the publication of the English-language version of Despair. One of the most strident of these occurs in his last novel, Look at the Harlequins! (1974). There, in a parody of his last Russian novel, The Gift, his narrator Vadim Vadimovich describes his own novel, The Dare (from Dar, the Russian title of The Gift). Whereas Nabokov's novel included a parodic biography of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Vadim's novel includes a parodic biography of Dostoevsky, “whose politics my author finds hateful and whose novels he condemns as absurd with their black-bearded killers presented as mere negatives of Jesus Christ's conventional image, and weepy whores borrowed from maudlin romances of an earlier age.”²⁸ Nabokov's “strong” opinions had clearly not weakened with the passage of time.

Over the course of his career, Nabokov's attitudes toward Dostoevsky's work underwent considerable evolution. From his obvious interest in Dostoevsky's treatment of issues of identity, delusion, multiplication of selves, etc., he became increasingly critical of what he saw as the author's basic flaws as an artist, and he was dismayed by the degree to which Dostoevsky's achievements were lauded in the West. Ultimately, he narrowed his critique to concentrate on Dostoevsky's treatment of the “sensitive murderer” and the “soulful prostitute.” Detecting the privileging of allegory and ideology over aesthetics, he sought to parody and debunk the most famous figure in Dostoevsky's fictive universe. Through a series of media—interviews, lectures, and, of course, fiction—Nabokov sought to rewrite and reshape the classic Dostoevskian character. Seen as a whole, Nabokov's relationship to Dostoevsky forms an intricate design marked by points of striking engagement and recoil.

Notes

1. Nabokov's own account of his repeated exposure to Crime and Punishment indicates some evolution in his views on Dostoevsky: “I must have been twelve when forty-five years ago I read Crime and Punishment for the first time and thought it a wonderfully powerful and exciting book. I read it again at nineteen, during the awful years of civil war in Russia, and thought it long-winded, terribly sentimental, and badly written. I read it at twenty-eight when discussing Dostoevski in one of my own books. I read the thing again when preparing to speak about him in American universities. And only recently did I discover what is so wrong about the book,” Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / Bruccoli Clark, 1981), 110. (Hereafter LRL.)

2. We will focus on Nabokov's prose, not on poetry or drama. For commentary on Nabokov's poetic references to Dostoevsky, see Nora Buhks, “Nabokov and Dostoevskii: Aesthetic Demystification,” Russian Writers on Russian Writers, ed. Faith Wigzell (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994), 132-33.

3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, “White Nights,” trans. David Magarshack, in Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 168. (Hereafter WN.)

4. Vladimir Nabokov, Mary, trans. Michael Glenny in collaboration with the author (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 27 (ch. 3). (Hereafter Mary.)

5. The narrator's account of his romance is divided into four sections entitled “First Night,” “Second Night,” and so on, and it ends with a section entitled “Morning.” A close examination of the narrative reveals, however, that an additional night passes without any description, and thus the events described in the story actually span six days, which happens to be the amount of time devoted to Ganin's activities in Berlin.

6. This comment oddly anticipates Dolly Haze's comment to Humbert Humbert: “You talk like a book, Dad” (Lo, 114 [pt. 1, ch. 27]).

7. Dostoevsky's dreamer speaks of the allure and the danger of the dreamer's life: “what can he find so attractive in the life which you and I desire so much? He thinks it a poor, miserable sort of life, and little does he know that some day perhaps the unhappy hour will strike for him too, when he will gladly give up all his fantastical years for one day of that miserable life” (WN, 167). This prediction seems to be borne out when Nabokov's character Podtyagin laments to Ganin: “I don't know, don't ask me, my dear chap. I put everything into my poetry that I should have put into my life” (Mary, 42 [ch. 5]).

8. See, inter alia, Julian W. Connolly, “Madness and Doubling: From Dostoevsky's The Double to Nabokov's The Eye,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 24 (1990): 129-39; Connolly, “The Function of Literary Allusion in Nabokov's Despair,” Slavic and East European Journal 26 (1982): 302-13; Sergej Davydov, “Dostoevsky and Nabokov: The Morality of Structure in Crime and Punishment and Despair,” Dostoevsky Studies 3 (1982): 157-70; and John Burt Foster, Jr., Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism (Princeton University Press, 1993), 97-109.

9. LRL, 104.

10. See David Gasparetti, “The Double: Dostoevsky's Self-Effacing Narrative,” Slavic and East European Journal 33 (1989): 217-34.

11. See Connolly, “Madness and Doubling,” for the details of this process. On the other hand, the narrator's thoughts while contemplating suicide in The Eye have closer affinities with similar moments in Dostoevsky's “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” and The Devils (also known as The Possessed) than with anything in The Double.

12. Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye, trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author (New York: Vintage International, 1990), xiv. (Hereafter Eye.)

13. Vladimir Nabokov, Despair (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 159 (ch. 9). (Hereafter Des.)

14. Dostoevsky, of course, was not the only writer whose treatment of the double would have come to Nabokov's attention. Others include E. T. A. Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson, about whom Nabokov lectured at Cornell. Yet it was not the double theme as often found in nineteenth-century literature (where doubling reflects a critical split in the human psyche, as, for example, between good and evil impulses) that attracted Nabokov's attention. As he told an interviewer: “The Doppelgänger subject is a frightful bore” (SO, 83). Rather, he was intrigued with the kind of imaginative freedom opened up by the concept of creating multiple alter egos and living in other identities.

15. See, for example, the discussions by Davydov (“Dostoevsky and Nabokov”), Connolly (“The Function of Literary Allusion”), and Foster (Nabokov's Art of Memory), as well as the comments of Liudmila Saraskina in “Nabokov, kotoryi branitsia …” in V. V. Nabokov: Pro et contra, ed. B. Averin, M. Malikova, and A. Dolinin (St. Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo Russkogo Khristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, 1997), 542-70.

16. Alexander Dolinin, “Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in Despair,” Cycnos 12.2 (1995): 44.

17. In Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov utilizes the theme of the double to illustrate Cincinnatus's struggle to cast off the constraints of enforced conformity he has accepted throughout his life. In The Gift, Nabokov creates an intricate pattern of doubling that is rooted in the very structure of the narrative point of view: the oscillations between the first-person and third-person modes of narration imply a complex relationship between the figure who narrates the action and that aspect of the same figure who fulfills the role of a character within the narrated action. Incidentally, it is worth noting that the hero of the novel, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, imagines a conversation in which his interlocutor, the poet Koncheyev, calls himself an “ardent admirer of the author of The Double and The Possessed”; see Gift, 341 (ch. 5).

18. RLSK, 203 (ch. 20).

19. For a discussion of some of these opinions, see Shlomith Rimmon, “Problems of Voice in Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,” PTL 1 (1976): 506-11.

20. For a summary of the early critical debate on the topic, see Pekka Tammi, Problems of Nabokov's Poetics: A Narratological Analysis (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1985), 201-04.

21. Note also Nabokov's admission of his interest in the writer “Sirin” in SM, 287-88 (ch. 14).

22. NWL, 172.

23. Hannah Green, “Mister Nabokov,” in Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute, ed. Peter Quennell (New York: William Morrow, 1980), 37.

24. Katherine Tiernan O'Connor, “Rereading Lolita, Reconsidering Nabokov's Relationship with Dostoevskij,” Slavic and East European Journal 33 (1989): 68.

25. Those who make such confessions orally in Dostoevsky's work are sometimes more successful in reaching out to their intended audience; Raskolnikov's confession to Sonia is one such example.

26. See O'Connor, “Rereading Lolita,” for a discussion of the parallels between Humbert's final meeting with Dolly Schiller and Svidrigailov's last encounter with Dunya in Crime and Punishment. For a discussion of parallels between Lolita and another Dostoevsky work—“The Gentle Creature” (“Krotkaia”), see Julian W. Connolly, “Nabokov's Dialogue with Dostoevsky: Lolita and ‘The Gentle Creature’,” Nabokov Studies 4 (1997): 15-36.

27. Dolinin points out that the “reorientation of the English Despair toward Dostoevsky” was prompted by the Western cultural context of the 1960s. He argues: “The main aim of Nabokov's individual crusade against Dostoevsky was not so much to dethrone his mighty predecessor as to undermine his critical cult in America, which tended to reduce all Russian cultural heritage to the soul-searching of Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.” Dolinin, “The Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in Despair,” Zembla, online, available at: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/doliI.htm, 2-3; this is a revised version of the article cited in n. 16 above.

28. LATH, 100 (pt. 2, ch. 5).