The Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in Despair
by Alexander Dolinin
page two of five

It is obvious that Nabokov is playing with the metaphors used by Ivanov and Adamovich, turning the tables on his detractor. For him, the art of keen sight is always superior to the art of insights, and he demonstrates his ability to name things by reworking the trite metaphor of "inner light" into the "defamiliarized" image of a closed, self-centered consciousness as a room with shuttered windows and a lamp burning inside. In this dichotomy Dostoevsky represents the inferior kind of vision from which Nabokov had always tried to distance himself. Yet, the very intensive "even" preceding Dostoevsky's name in the above quotation from The Gift clearly indicates that in the 1930's Nabokov distinguished him from "the average Russian literati" and recognized his outstanding talent in its own right as at least the brightest one of all the "inner lights." This mild, respectful, qualified reproach is a far cry from the strong opinions of Nabokov's American years, when he would chastise Dostoevsky as a "third-rate writer" whose "fame is incomprehensible" (Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 172), a "much overrated, sentimental and Gothic novelist of the time" (Eugene Onegin, 3, 191) or a "cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar" (Strong Opinions, 42).

In fact, at that time Nabokov did not deny Dostoevsky' even "the blessing of sensory cognition." In his imaginary conversation with Koncheev Fyodor mentions a brilliant visual detail in The Brothers Karamazov that is "worth saving" -- "a circular mark left by a wet wine glass on an outdoor table" (Gift, 84-85). Thus, even judged by the yardstick of Nabokov's own sensory aesthetics, Dostoevsky, in contrast to, say, Chernyshevsky or the trendy modernists personified by Shirin, is not completely blind to the "blessed matter" of the visible world. As Nabokov argued in his paper "Dostoevsky bez dostoevshchiny" (Dostoevsky without the Dostoevskian stuff) written in 193113--that is, less than a year before the inception of Despair--the overabundant political, religious, psychological, social, moral interpretations of Dostoevsky, especially the Freudian and Marxist ones, had buried his real artistic greatness. As noted in an anonymous newspaper review of Nabokov's paper, he opposed his own understanding of Dostoevsky to the so called "dostoevshchina" (the Dostoevskian stuff), that is to "stereotypes, clichés, banalities and dogmas" of perception which misrepresent the world created by the writer.14 Rereading The Brothers Karamazov through the prism of his own creative principles, Nabokov praises its cunning narrative techniques: intricate play with the reader (in the tradition of Eugene Onegin and Dead Souls) whom the author "incessantly urges and teases, trying to arouse his curiosity in every possible way"; the crafty construction of the plot (fabula) based on deception, retardation and concealment of information; expressive and suggestive details. Dostoevsky the artist, in Nabokov's view, fails only when he indulges in philosophizing through the mouthpiece of Alesha--"this mystical Ivan the Fool, the unhappy love of the author"--whose very presence "suddenly turns the other characters into talking mechanical dolls."

Nabokov argues that throughout the novel, the sermons of Alesha and Zosima notwithstanding, Dostoevsky proves himself to be a "sharp-sighted artist" (zorkii khudozhnik)--a compliment he conferred upon only a select few fellow-novelists. He cites several examples of Dostoevsky's supreme artistic sensibility, singling out for special praise the night scene in Karamazov's garden just prior to the murder (Part III, chapter 4: In the Dark). Nabokov admires Dostoevsky's characterization of Dmitrii, who "seems to be lit by magnesium flashes and enlivens everything that surrounds him," as well as the portrayal of Grushenka and, in particular, Smerdiakov, "a pathetic criminal, a stupid criminal."

Compared with the reprobations of Bunin or Aldanov, Nabokov's qualified praise reads almost like an eulogy. Whatever his all too predictable reservations, it is clear that in the 1930's Nabokov had no doubts about Dostoevsky's artistic greatness and thus had no intention of tumbling him off his pedestal. How one was disposed toward Dostoevsky still remained for him a matter of personal likes and dislikes rather than an indicator of bad/good taste. Thus in The Gift Fyodor is "disposed to slight . . . the author of The Double and The Possessed" while Koncheev, the poet of genius, is his "ardent admirer " (Gift, 353) though both of them are presented by Nabokov as paragons of impeccable literary judgment. In The Defense, the German psychiatrist responsible for wrenching chess from Luzhin and thereby destroying his creative mind forbids him to read Dostoevsky "who, in the professor's words, had an oppressive effect on the psyche of contemporary man" (Defense, 167).15 Hermann's scorn and loathing of Dostoevsky in the context of Despair should thus be connected with his overall cognitive horizon rather than directly identified with the authorial point of view.

In his essay "The Art of Literature and Commonsense" Nabokov, echoing St. Augustine, defined evil or, in his terms, "badness" as "the lack of something rather than a noxious presence." A criminal, he argued, usually lacks "real imagination" and contends himself with "half-witted banalities." Similarly, "lunatics are lunatics just because they have thoroughly and recklessly dismembered a familiar world but have not the power [...] to create a new one as harmonious as the old" (Lectures on Literature, 376-77). The protagonist and narrator of Despair belongs to both varieties of Nabokov's lackwits: he is a madman committing the nonsensical murder of a man whom he has erroneously taken for his physical double, or, better, a murderer bogging down in the quagmire of his own insanity. Like Smerdyakov in Nabokov's definition,16 Hermann, in spite of his pretensions to wit and talent, is "a pathetic criminal, a stupid criminal," and hence all his perceptions--of himself and his writing, of the people around him, of the world he inhabits and its supreme, God-like creator, and of the books he reads--are flawed.17 Among numerous cognitive and interpretative blunders he makes there is one that betrays his misreading of Dostoevsky. "I do not accept your sympathy," Hermann warns his hypothetical readers, "for among you there are sure to be a few souls who will pity me--me, a poet misunderstood. "Mist, vapor ... in the mist a chord that quivers " [Dym, tuman, struna drozhit v tumane] No, that's not verse, that's from old Dusty's book Crime and Slime. Sorry: Schuld and Sühne (German edition)" (177). The gleeful narrator thinks that he is quoting (or, better, misquoting, as he changes "twangs" for "quivers") the expressions of pity and sympathy addressed by Porfiry Petrovich to Raskolnikov in Part Six of Crime and Punishment.18 What he does not suspect, though, is that the phrase quoted is, in its turn, an intentional paraphrase of Gogol's "Memoirs of a Madman"19--a desperate cry for help reverberating in the deranged mind of a lunatic. Thus Hermann reads Dostoevsky only on the surface level, missing the artistic subtleties of the text, and the quotation backfires, undermining his inflated self-image and revealing who he really is: a pathetic madman on a par with Gogol's hero rather than a triumphant destroyer of Russian classics.20

The draft manuscript of Despair reveals that Nabokov initially had intended to use the double-edged and "double-authored" Dostoevsky/Gogol phrase as an epigraph to the novel, which would have emphasized its significance for the text as a whole. Generally speaking, in Nabokov's Ich-Erzählungs an incriminating quotation of this kind, unwittingly botched, misapplied or misunderstood by a narrator, often serves as an implanted clue that can lead the reader to the discovery of what the writer called "the inner scheme" of the story (see Selected Letters, 117). Alluding to some text, the narrator believes he is in control of all its meanings and implications but, in fact, does not realize that the quotation in itself exposes his lies, pretensions, and crimes. Other examples of this device (or, as it were, this intertextual trap) in Despair are Hermann's quotations of Pushkin's poetry. While he is thinking over his plan of killing his "double," taking his identity, and moving abroad, Hermann mutters the fragments of Pushkin's poem "'Tis time, my dear, 'tis time. The heart demands repose" in order to equate his crazy scheme with the poet's dream of escape (62-63). Yet, in quoting the finale of the poem, he omits two key words of the last line: if Pushkin is "contemplating flight / To a remote abode of work and pure delight" (pobeg / V obitel' dal'niuiu trudov i chistykh neg), that is to the "other world" of poetic imagination, Hermann's destination is truncated to the "near," earthly "abode of pure delight" excluding creativity. The incomplete quotation therefore exposes the narrator as an impostor who lacks a propensity for creative work. Similarly, when he alludes to Pushkin's dialogical poem "The Poet and the Rabble" (201), which contrasts the poetic ideal of "a song free and useless like wind" to the rabble's demands of "useful art," Hermann wants to present himself as a Pushkinian "novice of genius" tormented by the "rabble which refused [him] recognition" (203). However, the very motives of both his hideous crime and self-glorifying writing contradict Pushkin's poetic manifesto:

Ne dlia zhiteiskogo volnen'ia,
Ne dlia korysti, ne dlia bitv,
My rozhdeny dlia vdokhnoven'ia,
Dlia zvukov sladkikh i molitv.

[Not for worldly agitations,
Not for greed of gain, not for battles,
We are born for inspiration,
For sweet sounds and prayers.]

In the context of the novel, Dostoevsky, together with Pushkin, represents Russian literary heritage abused and misapprehended by the arrogant impostor, and hence cannot be the target of Nabokov's parody. Like his paper on The Brothers Karamazov, the Russian version of Despair seems to attack not Dostoevsky but "dostoevshchina," that is the strong Dostoevskian trend in contemporary Russian literature--the shopworn criminal plots, threadbare apocalyptic prophesies, self-conscious psychopathic characters modeled on Raskolnikov or the Man from Underground, trite moral and psychological paradoxes, overused "landscapes of ideas," and so forth. In fact, Hermann's mind always operates within the confines of "mrachnaia dostoevshchina" (R 458; in the English version, "the dark Dostoevskian stuff"[205]) as his victorious antagonist Ardalion (himself endowed with a genuine artistic sensibility) scornfully calls his banal lies and inventions. If in the English version of Despair Hermann notices with horror that his writing has become "too literary ... smacking of thumb-screw conversations in those stage taverns where Dostoevsky is at home" (98), the Russian original defines the stock conversation scene in a slightly different way: "butaforskie kabaki imeni Dostoevskogo," that is "taverns named after Dostoevsky." This discrepancy is significant insofar as it reflects a very important change in parodic targeting of English Despair--a shift from the progeny to the progenitor, from the contemporary "dostoevshchina" to Dostoevsky.

Historically speaking, there were two waves of "dostoevshchina" in Russian literature between 1900 and the early 1930's. The first swept through prose and drama, both Symbolist and so-called "realist," in the pre-revolutionary years and fed mostly upon Dostoevskian themes of the individualistic revolt against the "world order" that leads a daring protagonist either to madness and death or to salvation through suffering. Numerous characters of Bely, Briusov, Remizov, Gippius, Andreev, Artsybashev, and other writers tried on the mantles of the Underground Man, Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Kirillov or Ivan Karamazov, grappled with the "ultimate questions" and enjoyed, to quote the English version of Despair, "all the Dusty-and-Dusky charm of hysterics" (188).23 The second wave overtook Russian prose in the 1920's when the Dostoevskian concept of the "broad, too broad" Russian soul as the battlefield of "the devil struggling with God" was widely used to psychologize and spiritualize the terrible experience of the Revolution and Civil War. In his paper on contemporary Soviet writers Nabokov noted their common obsession with "l’âme slave à la Dostoevski," blasting Gladkov, Pilniak, Seifulina and even Zoshchenko for the trivial treatment of "Russianness."

13. Nabokov read this paper at a literary meeting in Berlin. For a brief account of the event, see: Brian Boyd. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990, 363.

14. A.B.V. "Literaturnyi vecher zhurnalistov." Rul', 1931, March 24.

15. The psychiatrist condemns both chess ("Horror, suffering, despair [...] those are what this exhausting game gives rise to" [162]) and Dostoevsky's novels ("oppressive effect [...] a terrible mirror") in similar terms, thereby linking Dostoevsky with the creative urge censured and suppressed by Freudian psychoanalysis. Nabokov lampoons contemporary German attacks on Dostoevsky as a champion of destructive "Russian chaos." On the hostile German reception of Dostoevsky at the end of the 1920's, see: Vladimir Weidle. "Evropeiskie sud'by Dostoevskogo." Vozrozhdenie, 1930, March 20.

16. At the end of Chapter 10 Hermann inadvertently asserts his kinship with Smerdiakov when he complains that his having murdered Felix and taken over his identity has turned him into a "musician" like "lackadaisical footmen in Russia" who "used to twang guitars on summer evenings" (174; cf.: "kak v Rossii igrali na gitarakh letnimi vecherami lakei" [R 439]). The simile alludes to "Smerdiakov with a Guitar"--a chapter of The Brothers Karamazov in which the lackey Smerdiakov is twanging his guitar in a garden on a summer evening.

17. On Hermann as a blundering impostor who rebels against the legitimate creator of the text and is punished for his transgressions, see: Ellen Pifer. Nabokov and the Novel. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1980, 98-105; Sergej Davydov. "Teksty-matreshki" Vladimira Nabokova. München: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1982, 52-99; Julian W. Connolly. Nabokov's Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other. Cambridge University Press, 1992, 143-160.

18. Cf.: "[...] you are impatient, and very ill, Rodion Romanovich. That you are daring, presumptuous, serious, and ... have felt, have already felt a great deal [...] All these feelings are familiar to me, and I read your little article as a familiar one. It was worked out on sleepless nights and in a frenzy, with a heaving and pounding heart, with suppressed enthusiasm. [...] I scoffed a bit then, but now I shall tell you that in general--that is, as an amateur--I'm terribly fond of these first, youthful, ardent tests of the pen. Smoke, mist, a string twanging in the mist. Your article is absurd and fantastic, but there are flashes of such sincerity in it, there is pride in it, [...] there is courage of despair" (Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment, 452).

19. Cf.: "[...] tuman steletsia pod nogami; struna zvenit v tumane" (a mist wreathes beneath the feet, a string /chord/ twangs in the mist). The source is indicated in William C. Carroll's "The Cartesian Nightmare of Despair," 88; see also Pekka Tammi's excellent article "Seventeen Remarks on Poligenetichnost' in Nabokov's Prose." Studia Slavica Finlandensia, Helsinki (1990), vol. 7, 208-209.

20. There are several other veiled allusions to "Memoirs of a Madman" in Despair. "A strong wind from Spain" (181) and Hermann's associations with royalty (cf.: "we came out, like kings, on the balcony" [109]) evoke the delusion of Gogol's character Poprishchin, who imagines himself to be the king of Spain; "sobachka, malen'kaia i zlaia" (R 355; lit. "a little vicious dog"; translated as "their dog, a vicious little creature" [38]) first mentioned by Hermann in connection with the scene of his future crime and which later resurfaces in his triple nightmare (cf. the triple nightmares of the failed artist Chartkov, another madman of Gogol, and Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment) as a small white "mock dog" (96-97) resembles two "horrible little dogs" (sobachki) whose conversation Poprishchin deems to hear; the stick that eventually destroys Hermann's "perfect crime" alludes to the punishment of Poprishchin, who is regularly whacked across the back with a stick in the madhouse; a story about students shaving a round patch on the head of their drunken friend and dressing him up as an abbot reminds one of "people with shaved heads," the inmates of the asylum, whom Poprishchin takes for "Dominicans or Capuchins"; pondering what to call his book, Hermann almost hits upon the title of Gogol's story: "something beginning with Memoirs of a-- ." (201). The Russian original also contains a few sound echoes of "Memoirs of a Madman," for example, the recurrent word "podnozhka" (derived from under + nose) combined with "shishka" (a cone, knob or lump [R 355, 434-36) seems to hints at the last phrase of Poprishchin's memoirs: "A u Alzhirskogo beia pod nosom shishka" (literally, The King of Algeria has a knob under his nose). Since such echoes were completely untranslatable, the English version compensates with at least one additional veiled allusion to Gogol's story: when in Tarnitz Hermann suddenly feels "the Caspian wind's soft pressure" (67), this alludes to Poprishchin's mad idea that "the brain ... is carried by the wind from the direction of the Caspian Sea." The taunting allusions to "Memoirs of a Madman" that remain beyond the horizon of the narrator liken him to Dostoevsky's pathetic madman Goliadkin in The Double, who also misses the association with Poprishchin's "little dog" (sobachka). Cf.: "A miserable little stray dog [...] attached itself to Mr. Goliadkin and trotted along beside him [...] A long forgotten idea, a recollection of something that had happened in the distant past now came into his head and hammered away there, irritating him and refusing to let him be. "Ugh! Wretched little dog!" muttered Goliadkin, not understanding what he was saying" (Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. New York: Harper & Row, 1968, 43).

21. I follow here Khodasevich's interpretation of Pushkin's programmatic triad which may have influenced Nabokov's reading of these lines. See: Vladislav Khodasevich. "O chtenii Pushkina." Sovremennye zapiski, kn. 20 (1924), 227-234.

22. Cf. also Hermann's exclamation in Chapter Two: "But I give you my word, gentlemen, my word of honor: not mercenary greed, not merely that, not merely the desire to improve my position..." (42; "No chestnoe slovo, gospoda, chestnoe slovo--ne koryst', ne tol'ko koryst', ne tol'ko zhelanie dela svoi popravit'..." [R 357]).

23. In the Russian original Nabokov alludes to Dostoevsky by using the word "nadryvchik," a diminutive of "nadryv" (translated as "strain") profusely used in Part Two, Book Four, of The Brothers Karamazov and, for Silver Age criticism, signifying the specificity of the Dostoevskian psychological world-view. Cf., for example, Blok's definition of Dostoevsky as a seeker who "carries eternal anxiety and strain (nadryv) in his soul" (Aleksandr Blok. Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh. Tom 5. Moskva-Leningrad, 1962, 79). The very scene in which Hermann feels the charms of the Dostoevskian "strain," sobbing violently in front of the compassionate doctor, parodies the Underground Man's fit of hysterics in front of the compassionate prostitute. The irony of the scene is that the protagonist preoccupied with his own "dostoevshchina" does not notice that the doctor actually brands him as a murderer when he says: "[...] it is not only in Germany that murderers exist, we have our own Landrus, thank heaven, so that you are not alone (188; cf. in the original: "[...] ne v odnoi Germanii ubiitsy, u nas est' svoi Landriu, tak chto vy ne edinstvennyi" [R 448]).