98
PARTISAN REVIEW
one architectural flaw he did discern in it (Vronsky's suicide
attempt, awkward both psychologically and structurally), Nabokov
avoided all mention of the fact that
Anna Karenina
is a complex social
and political novel. Similarly, his discussion of
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
passes over in silence that work's historical and topical dimensions,
while at the same time doing full justice to its permanently valid
social satire.
It
was not that he was not aware of these aspects of the
two works; but pointing them out would have contradicted his entire
method of teaching.
The lecture on Dostoevsky is the big surprise of the series. The
surprise is not Nabokov's well-known aversion to him, which often
puzzled his interviewers and readers. Perceived in the West as an
inexplicable aberration, his negative view of Dostoevsky's achieve–
ment was in fact shared by some of his more illustrious predecessors
in the Russian literary tradition. Tolstoy, for example, when discus–
sing
The Brothers Karamazov,
wrote of his revulsion for the book's
"lack of artistic quality, its frivolity, posturings and wrong-headed
attitude toward important matters." Anton Chekhov was bored by
Dostoevsky's novels and thought them long-winded and preten–
tious. Marina Tsvetaeva regarded Dostoevsky as altogether unnec–
essary. Just as Nabokov thought
The Double
(an early novel heavily
influenced by Gogol) Dostoevsky's finest work, Tsvetaeva made an
exception for another early work, the story "White Nights,"
because it was by a Dostoevsky who was "still one third Gogol and
one third Dickens," two writers she loved.
Given Nabokov's outlook on life, art, and politics, his recoil
from everything Dostoevsky stands for was inevitable. What
is
unex–
pected is Nabokov's thorough familiarity with Dostoevsky's entire
oeuvre
and the numerous insights he brings to his discussion of the
novels. The vividly Nabokovian reading of
The Idiot,
the discussion
of the clash between the farcical chapter headings in
The Brothers
Karamazov
and the actual content of those chapters, and the insis–
tence on the theatrical source of Dostoevsky's novelistic tech–
niques-on Dostoevsky as a potential playwright trapped inside the
novelist-can be valued by Dostoevsky scholars who may otherwise
totally disagree with Nabokov's view of him.
The occasional appreciative statements, however grudgingly
made, are particularly fascinating:
The Brothers Karamazov
as a "riot–
ous whodunit in slow motion"; the plot of
The Idiot"
ably developed,
with many ingenious devices to prolong the suspense" (even if some
