SOURCE: “Nabokov and Dostoevskii: Aesthetic Demystification,” translated by Arnold McMillin, in Russian Writers on Russian Writers, edited by Faith Wigzell, Berg Publishers, 1994, pp. 131-37.

Nabokov's characterisation of Dostoevskii was both harsh and eccentric. With unwavering insistence throughout his whole life—in correspondence, conversation, interviews, lectures and in his own novels (Despair, The Gift and Look at the Harlequins!)—Nabokov called Dostoevskii ‘a mediocre writer of mystery stories’.¹ The shockingness of this judgement has often drawn sharp reactions,² been taken as an aesthetic provocation, and, in the context of Nabokov's literary behaviour as a whole, been deemed more of an artistic pose than an artistic position.³

Nabokov did not write much about Dostoevskii. We know two early verses, a lecture in Russian entitled ‘Dostoevskii without dostoevshchina’ given at an evening of the Union of Russian Writers in Berlin on 20 March 1931, and the Lectures on Russian Literature comprising six essays on six writers, including one on Dostoevskii. These lectures, prepared posthumously from manuscript notes for university courses, cannot be considered as complete literary entities (with the exception of the essay on Gogol' which was published in 1944). This fact, however, has preserved in the texts the impression of the living spoken word, and reveals the devices of Nabokov's teaching methods, with the inevitable repetition of basic principles and the developed argumentation of critical observations. In accordance with the law of parody, so beloved of Nabokov, the main features with which he reproached Dostoevskii—domination of ideas over style, philosophising and moralising—were demonstrated by Nabokov himself in the utilitarian and didactic form manner typical of lectures.

Nabokov's attitude to Dostoevskii, despite its obvious consistency, was formed and realised over a period of years. Andrew Field and Brian Boyd quote in English translation a poem about Dostoevskii by Nabokov dating from 1919: ‘Listening to his nightly howl / God wondered: can it really be / that everything I gave / was so frightful and complicated?’⁴ This was the first aesthetic protest by the young poet against a view and presentation of the world which he found repulsive and outrageous. The semantic emphasis of the verse is shifted from the subject to the action. The inability of an artist to see beauty is understood as lack of creative vision. …

In 1921 Nabokov wrote a poem on the fortieth anniversary of Dostoevskii's death. Entitled ‘Skazanie’, it was printed in Rul on 11 November 1921 with the subtitle ‘Iz Apokrifa’. It tells how Christ and his disciples were walking through a garden and saw ‘on the sunlit sand … the corpse of a dog’. The apostles and Christ interpret the scene differently, and the difference reveals the true Creator ….

In this poem Nabokov enters into open dispute with Dostoevskii and his famous philosophical assertion that ‘beauty will save the world’. According to Nabokov, the creative strength of art, the strength that creates beauty, consists in the ability to see the world in its unexpected brightness, in the freshness of new perception. The concept of beauty in such an interpretation is displaced from the natural realm of spirituality to the creative realm, perceived and produced in verbal form by the skill of the writer. The chosen form of the poem, a parable, lends Nabokov's ideas a religious and moral nuance analogous to the sense of Dostoevskii's idea.⁵

In his biography of Nabokov, Brian Boyd mentions a lecture on Dostoevskii given by Nabokov ten years after the above verse was written.⁶ This was an unusual kind of turning over of ideas, in preparation for a new novel—Despair.

In Nabokov's lectures all his earlier remarks and thoughts about Dostoevskii are brought together in a coherent text of investigative analysis. The author's dual viewpoint—as writer and as teacher—is realised by the following method: Nabokov reconstructs Dostoevskii's poetic world, exposes the devices of his poetics of expressiveness, and reveals the influences, but does it within the bounds of literary text analysis and terminology. His position as a writer lends striking individuality to Nabokov's exposition, and the tactics of literary scholarship allow him to carry out his express task: ‘to debunk Dostoevski’ (p. 98).

Dostoevskii's fiction had, in Nabokov's view, undergone the strong influence of European sentimental and Gothic novels: ‘The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he [Dostoevskii—N.B.] liked, placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos’ (p. 10). Richardson, Radcliffe, Dickens, Rousseau, Sue—such were the immediate literary ‘ancestors’ of Dostoevskii. It was their influence that determined the domination of sentimental melodrama in his prose. As for Dostoevskii's basic philosophical formula ‘egoism—Antichrist—Europe’ and its opposite ‘brotherhood—Christ—Russia’ (p. 103), it was formed, in Nabokov's opinion, as a result of borrowing ideas from the West. This brings Nabokov to an unexpected and striking conclusion: ‘Dostoevski, who so hated the West, was the most European of Russian writers’ (p. 103). It may be supposed that this playful conclusion was a reply to the numerous émigré critics who had criticised Nabokov himself for the ‘unrussianness’ of his novels.⁷

This disputing of Dostoevskii's literary authority is conducted by Nabokov from the point of view of artistic mastery. His starting-point is the definition of literary art in Nabokov's own understanding. He writes:

art is a divine game. … It is divine because this is the element in which man comes nearest to God through becoming a true creator in his own right. And it is a game, because it remains art only as long as we are allowed to remember that, after all, it is all make-believe, that the people on the stage … are not actually murdered, in other words, only as long as our feelings of horror or disgust do not obscure our realisations that we are as readers or as spectators, participating in an elaborate and enchanting game: the moment this balance is upset we get on the stage ridiculous melodrama ….

(p. 106)

In the balance between ‘le vrai’ and ‘le vraisemblable’ Nabokov sees the main condition for art. The concept of the real and the true in art is understood by him not in the accuracy of imitation of life but in the strength of creative expressiveness. For this reason Dostoevskii's works, marked by artistic carelessness, stylistic inexpressiveness, imprecision of details and definitions, is assessed by Nabokov as mediocre and unreal literature.

The landscape of Dostoevskii's novels, as Nabokov observes, ‘is a landscape of ideas, a moral landscape’ (p. 104), his characters, bearers of the author's ideas, ‘are merely puppets’ (p. 129); only the plot is lively, as in detective stories.

Nabokov bitterly criticised Dostoevskii's approach to literature as a means of seeking the truth, mocked the writer's predilection for using the extreme conditions of psychopathology and criminal plots for the demonstration and affirmation of his religious and moral ideas. In The Gift this criticism is expressed in a witty form: Dostoevskii's works are called a ‘reverse transformation from Bedlam to Bethlehem’.⁸

For Nabokov, who saw in art not a moral but an aesthetic meaning, the works of Dostoevskii, the moraliser and philosopher, were without artistic value. He expounded this position in his lectures, and this is, as it were, the declarative, external layer of Nabokov's attitude to Dostoevskii. There is, however, another layer, deeper and more hidden, reflected in literary allusions, in parodic references, in the intertextual links between Nabokov's works and Dostoevskii's novels.

The object of reflection in Nabokov's works is culture, i.e. a world which has already once been reconstituted by art, and this explains the extensive presence of other texts in Nabokov's novels. But what is surprising is that on equal terms with authors whom Nabokov respected and loved we find Dostoevskii, a writer who was, in Nabokov's opinion, ‘mediocre’ and aesthetically inimical to him.

Some critics have written of the direct influence of Dostoevskii on Nabokov, thus of course arousing the latter's wrath. In one interview Nabokov declared unequivocally that Dostoevskii had no influence at all on Russian literature.⁹ It would seem that in Nabokov's novels the ‘traces’ of Dostoevskii's texts can be regarded as examples of parody, but realised on various poetic levels. They are both extensive and varied. Here are some of them.

Commentators have more than once pointed out the link between The Eye and The Double.¹⁰ Nabokov's novel Despair is an open parody of Dostoevskii's Crime and Punishment and The Double. The addressee is named directly in the text through the device of misquotation: ‘“Mist, vapour … in the mist a chord that quivers.” No, that's not verse, that's from old Dusty's great book, Crime and Slime. Sorry: Schuld und Sühne (German edition).’¹¹ Raskol'nikov's idea about the permissibility of crime for ‘people possessing the gift and talent’¹² is given literal incarnation by Nabokov. Crime is accomplished as a work of art, and the murderer sees himself as an artist. The banality of the plan reveals lack of talent, and the novel repeats Nabokov's judgement that crime is always untalented and mediocre.¹³ The profit motives behind the murder, although they are disguised by the work's ideology, cast the shadow of hypertrophied ambitions on Dostoevskii himself.

In Invitation to a Beheading the parodic coding of the image of Rodion Romanovich Raskol'nikov, the criminal, in the names of the personnel at the fortress, Rodion, Roman, Rodrigo, has been noted.¹⁴ This does not exhaust all the parodic allusions. There are, for example, Cincinnatus and M. Pierre, who repeat the pairing of Raskol'nikov and Porfirii. Attention is drawn not only by the similarity of appearances (M. Pierre is literally copied from Porfirii) or the similarities in behaviour (compare the fainting fits of Cincinnatus and Raskol'nikov), but, most important, the similarity of the situations in which both pairs of characters find themselves. This last factor reveals the strained, hidden moral struggle upon which, according to Dostoevskii's design, his characters are entering. Their parodic incarnation, as Cincinnatus and M. Pierre, placed in the fortress, destroys the unpredictability of the result of the ideological encounter. The conversations between Porfirii and Raskol'nikov with their intellectual struggle are turned by Nabokov into the farcical conversations of M. Pierre with Cincinnatus.

In his own works Nabokov realised artistically what he had constantly reproached Dostoevskii for, namely using the criminal plot and narrative technique of the police novel. The criminal theme and the clichéd, melodramatic plot are used by him especially frequently in his Russian novels. But Nabokov's demonstrative use of the clichéd theme reflects, as a contrast, the high artistic quality of his particular use of it. In this Nabokov realised one variant of Flaubert's dream of the ideal novel, the narration of which would be supported not by the plot but by style. Nabokov's solution was an exciting story-line which, on account of the rich imagery and the expressiveness of language, becomes of secondary importance in the novel.

In Nabokov's relations with Dostoevskii this is a regular argument, namely that even in the most banal material the artist sees and reconstitutes the unique beauty of life.

Another example of intertextuality may perhaps be seen on the thematic level, in two novels about a gambler: The Defence is a parodic response to Dostoevskii's The Gambler.

When Lolita appeared, critics pointed out the similarity of Nabokov's work to Dostoevskii's novels, having in mind the presence of psychopathological deviations. But the link between them would seem to be of a somewhat different nature. One possible reading of Lolita is as a parodied transformation of the famous chapter from Dostoevskii's The Possessed, ‘At Tikhon's’. The parodic interrelations of the two texts are reflected not only in the semantic overthrowing of the moralising theme—the corruption of a minor in which the victim turns out to be more corrupt than the criminal (the roles change)—but in the demonstrative parallelism of form and characters: ‘Lolita, the Confession of a Blonde Widower’ and ‘Stavrogin's Confession’, both intended for publication, fall respectively into the hands of Dr John Ray and his parodic double Archpriest Tikhon, philosopher, psychologist and expert in human souls.¹⁵

This theme of a terrible sin, the corruption of an innocent child's soul, runs through very many of Dostoevskii's works. One example is Svidrigailov's secret crime in Crime and Punishment. Nabokov's story The Enchanter is a parodic attempt at this theme. ‘Svidrigailov, the embodiment of evil’, wrote Nabokov, ‘is purely romantic invention’ (p. 115). The romantic nature of the image is transformed by Nabokov into the degraded romanticisation of a committed crime.

Thus even a swift enumeration of the intertextual links between Nabokov's novels and Dostoevskii's works shows that Nabokov's attitude to the classic whom he criticised so cruelly was far from unequivocal. Our suspicions are also aroused by a fact from his biography: in 1950 Nabokov agreed to translate The Brothers Karamazov for Pascal Covici of Viking Press, but was subsequently obliged by illness to withdraw from the project.¹⁶

Nabokov in his lectures, which were designed, as he himself acknowledged, for an audience which was ill-informed about art (p. 98), as a teacher strove for the literary demystification of Dostoevskii. In his own novels, on the other hand, Nabokov the writer demonstrated a more complex artistic response to him. It was embodied in numerous literary echoes, in an acute need to engage in a literary polemic, and simply in the constant feeling of Dostoevskii's presence as an artistic opponent. And this attitude of Nabokov the writer lends ambivalence to the demystification of Dostoevskii by Nabokov the teacher.

Notes

1. V. Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, London, 1983, p. 98. Quotations from this edition will hereafter be noted by page numbers in the text.

2. Nabokov's embittered attacks on Dostoevskii provoked irritation in émigré, and later, American literary circles. They led to complications in his relations with the students at Cornell, which nearly got Nabokov into trouble. See B. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov. The American Years, Princeton, 1991, pp. 181, 308. Boyd considers that Nabokov's criticism of Dostoevskii was the reason for Roman Jakobson's refusal to invite him to Harvard: ibid., p. 303. Thus his attitude to Dostoevskii may be seen to have played a fateful role in Nabokov's life.

3. A. Dolinin, ‘Tsvetnaia spiral’ Nabokova', in V. Nabokov, Rasskazy. Priglashenie na kazn'. Esse. Interv'iu. Retsenzii, Moscow, 1989, pp. 440-1. Dolinin's article comprises a rich compilation of various assessments of Nabokov's works.

4. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov. The Russian Years, London, 1990, p. 7. A. Field, Vladimir Nabokov: His Life in Art, London, 1967, p. 71. The poem was published in the collection Gornii put', Berlin, 1923.

5. Nabokov in his essay ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’ wrote: ‘The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction. The material of this world may be real enough … but does not exist at all as an accepted entirety: it is chaos. … The writer is the first man to map it and to name the natural objects it contains.’ See V. Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, New York and London, 1982, p. 7.

6. Boyd, Nabokov. The Russian Years, p. 363.

7. The émigré critics reproached Sirin for breaking with the humanitarian traditions of Russian literature and emphasised his ‘unrussianness’. For instance, G. Ivanov, in a review of the novel King, Queen, Knave, wrote that it had been made ‘according to the latest model of the “most advanced Germans’”, and that ‘The Defence had been copied from a mediocre French model’. See Chisla, no. 1, 1930, p. 234. In the same issue of Chisla G. Adamovich published a review of The Defence in which he asserted that ‘the novel could appear in Nouvelle Revue Française and pass there unnoticed amongst the host of middling works of current French belletristics’. Zinaida Shakhovskaia also writes about Nabokov's ‘unrussianness’ in her book V poiskakh Nabokova, Paris, 1979.

8. V. Nabokov, The Gift, Ann Arbor, 1975, p. 83.

9. Brian Boyd quotes this story in his Nabokov. The American Years, p. 308.

10. One of the first to notice this was Andrew Field in his Vladimir Nabokov: His Life in Art, p. 168.

11. V. Nabokov, Despair, London, 1969, p. 172.

12. F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30-i tomakh, 1972-86, Leningrad, vol. 6, 1973, p. 200.

13. V. Nabokov, ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’, in Lectures on Literature, p. 376.

14. G. Shapiro, ‘Russkie literaturnye alliuzii v romane Nabokova Priglashenie na kazn”, Russian Literature, vol. 9, 1981, p. 373.

15. In Russian there is clear assonance between Ray's surname and Tikhon's title: arkhierei.

16. Boyd, Nabokov. The American Years, pp. 146-7.